Lightbreaker

His mouth worked a minute, finding the right sequence of words. 'Detective Nicols says he has no recollection of the events.'

'Does he? He's probably still trying to figure out what happened.' If the detective had any recollection of Doug being in his body, it would be vague-fleeting memories detached from his own personal history. They would fade, dissolving into a general unease, touched off by these ghostly fragments. This disorientation would persist at the edge of his consciousness for a few weeks, then it would vanish like wisps of a bad dream.

Though, he could try to hang on to them. Try to attach them to his own storage schemas. He might. He seemed like the persistent type.

'What are you going to do if he keeps thinking about this morning?'

'That's not your problem.'

'No, I suppose not. I have a different problem, don't I? What do you want to accomplish here, Lieutenant?' I gestured around the room, indicating the lack of standard interrogation room accoutrements. No two-way mirror. No cameras. No digital audio recorders.

Just two magi, talking.

'I want to understand what happened on the boat.'

'I told you: psychoanimist possession. I was following an astral traveler. He started jacking bodies.'

'But how did you two get on the ferry? Why were you tracking him?'

I didn't answer.

Pender sighed. He retrieved the picture from the table, and slipped it back into his folder. His attention went to the other pages. 'Landis M. Markham,' he read. 'What does the 'M' stand for?'

'Michael,' I told him. 'My mother's Catholic heritage. Not my father's favorite.' While I preferred it to my given name, that preference was only known to a handful of people. I had been through too many places that believed in the power of names to not protect myself.

'Born and raised in Idaho,' he continued. 'Moved to Seattle in the early 1990s where you attended the University of Washington. Studied archaeology, though you didn't stay long enough to get a degree.'

'There was a scandal,' I offered. 'Involving hominid skulls.'

He ignored my flippancy. 'Where did you go, Mr. Markham? You quit your job at REI that same year. Struck by a bit of wanderlust, were you? You've been to a lot of places since then.' His finger ran down a list on the page. 'TSA provided an interesting list: France, Hungary, Italy, Morocco, China, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Brazil, Argentina, Jamaica. Quite the intrepid traveler, aren't you?'

'It's the nature of my business,' I said. 'It requires me to, uh, travel.' My voice stumbled on the word. I realized the question underlying his emphasis on the word.

Traveler.

It was a code word, not just a descriptive noun but a title. A rank. He was asking me to identify myself: to recognize his word and reply with some acknowledgement, some secret passphrase known to initiates like himself. He was asking me for confirmation that I, too, was a Watcher.

Shit.

This explained our private conversation. Why he dangled the carrot about cleaning up this mess. Pender's offer to make the situation evaporate was honest, if I was one of his brothers. If I flashed him the secret hand signal, he would do exactly what he was here to do: keep the secrets hidden, and make sure the interests of the Watchers were maintained.

The trouble was I hadn't kept up my membership. They thought I was dead. It was the only way to leave the organization.

IV

The members of La Societe Lumineuse were Witnesses, True Seeing observers whose focus was the preservation of magickal knowledge. A worldwide network of subversive agents and dedicated spies, they were positioned in auspicious locations and key jobs so as to manipulate events and individuals. Secret movers and shakers, acting to keep the occult hidden. They were based in Paris, and their original name has been purposefully forgotten. They had learned from the lesson so brutally put to their original incarnation when thirteen of them were burned at the stake in the fourteenth century. They acted in secrecy because the rest of the world preferred ignorance, preferred not to be reminded of the necessity for guardians of the occult lore.

I had been in Paris once upon a time. Like a fairy tale. Self-cast as the hero of that fable, I studied for several years, even reached Journeyman-a neophyte grade in the art of Watching. Journeymen who demonstrate aptitude and ambition become Travelers and go forth to earn their place in the world, always watching and reporting back to their masters. My fairy tale collapsed before I could be graded for Traveler. Every story has a hero, a heroine, and a villain. In the end, the tale got rewritten; I became the villain.

'And what is your business?' Pender sat in one of the two chairs at the table. He indicated the other chair. While his body language projected indifference, his eyes watched me closely. Witnessing. At the very least, Pender had to be a Traveler.

'Antiques.' I swallowed the obstruction in my throat that had been raised by the shadow of my past. I had carefully avoided the Watchers since I had left Paris, preferring the anonymity of death to the. . headache of being alive. If he reported me to his masters, they would be curious as to why I was running around without a leash. One of them would be more than curious. 'My clients have very specific tastes. I have to go where the markets are hot if I want to stay in business.'

'How do your clients find you?' he asked. He gave no hint he had even offered a recognition signal, no sense he was waiting for me to acknowledge his code word.

Was I imagining a connection which didn't exist? 'Personal references.' I sat down.

'Ah, that sort of antique market,' he said. 'Were you working for a client last night?'

'Visiting a friend.'

'The traveler on the boat?'

I shook my head. He had just asked me to acknowledge myself again. When he decided I was unaware of his connection to the Watchers-when he decided I wasn't one of them-the opportunity to dismiss this situation would vanish. What would my options be? To ask for a lawyer and try to get bail posted? To demand to know the charges being levied against me and protest my innocence?

A pall of silence hung in the room while we both considered which direction to take the conversation. 'You pose an interesting problem, Mr. Markham,' he said. I didn't intrude into his thought, and he let that statement hang for a minute. He examined the pages in his folder. 'Your father taught at Western Washington University, didn't he?' he asked, momentarily setting aside the quandary of my presence.

'Yeah, he taught Washington State history.'

'Used to be a farmer. Potatoes, was it?'

I nodded.

'Fairly successful transformation for a man who never finished high school.'

'He was good at applying himself,' I said. 'He worked hard for the degree and was proud of it.' Proud, and always a little nervous the rest of the administration would discover he was a high school dropout from southern Idaho. His father had died unexpectedly one summer. He had suffered a mild heart attack while working the field, and lost control of the tractor. By the time they found him and the vehicle in the ditch that ran along the southern edge of the property, the sun had taken him away from the family. My father took over and, even with his youthful will and energetic body, the local potato conglomerate still managed to gut the family for the land. It just took a few years longer than their projections. Small victories. My father's mother died in her sleep two days after the paperwork for the sale was signed.

My mother had always been a frail phantom, a child of New England more suited to central heating and sturdy brownstones than windswept winters and arid summers. She died the winter after the dissolution of the family farm. My father brought what was left of the family-me and my sister-west to Seattle, where he tried to bury the past. For the rest of his life, my father, no matter how hard he tried, felt that he could never fully get the Idaho dirt out from beneath his fingernails.