below the shark petroglyphs. 'Look at what's chiseled in the center.'
He did-and his jaw fell open. 'Oh my God.'
'Uh-huh. The Hawaiians carved a lot of weird shit,' she said. 'But never, ever a dragon.' • • •
'You went looking for a rift in a seamount.' They sat in a bed of hapuu at the base of the ruined temple. He studied her profile in the dim light of the crescent moon, but a fan of her hair hid her face. 'You said you didn't remember what happened.'
'I don't, not everything. But no one ever asked me where.'
'Split hairs often?'
'Look, I'm an academic. This is huge. The only dragon we know of to come through a rift is Ghostwalker. But if I can prove other dragons came through other rifts… It's the discovery of a lifetime.'
'And it cost a man his, someone you said you loved.'
'Don't you fucking judge me. I don't need a guilty conscience; I've got one, thanks.' She blew out an angry breath. 'I've kept my end of the bargain. Now you keep yours. Why the fuck are you here?'
So he told her-some of it. She listened without interrupting until he fell silent, and then said, 'Your people want to close it?'
'That's right. I told you: We repair the world. Tikkun olam. Yeah, okay, Ghostwalker came through, but so do shedim. If it's there, even if the rift's intermittent, it's my job to seal it. I guess we use what you'd call magic, but for the Rebbe, it's a gift, a channeling of energy from someone, something else.'
'God?'
'Call it whatever you want. Mana, life force… When we invoke that kind of power, it has to be for the right purpose.'
'Read: godly, right? Great, a religious nut.'
'And what you did wasn't a little nutty?'
'That was my job.'
'This is mine.'
'But don't you see? You're no different from the guys who want all the metahumans to crawl back under a rock. Who are you to decide what should be in this world, and what shouldn't? How do you know this isn't the way the world is supposed to be? Hell, didn't angels talk to people all the time? Weren't there miracles and giants and demons?'
'And the First Born of Man gave to him the names of the djinns and lilin and the shedim gave them iron to bind spirits and their letters for protection, so the remnant concealed themselves in the remotest mountains and in the depths of the ocean,' he said. 'That's from an old Hebrew legend, a Midrash.'
'Meaning?'
'That evil is all around and contained, but that sometimes it breaks free. It's my job to bind it again.'
'Don't dodge the question. What gives you the right?'
'We have a code.'
'So do hired assassins.' She snorted. 'Who is this rabbi of yours?'
'He's… Well, he saved my life. Or maybe he helped me see that we're all broken in one way or another, just like the world.'
'Take a good look around. Does this valley look broken to you?'
A flare of anger. 'Listen, don't give me any of your self-righteous bullshit. You can't imagine my life, what I've done, how it was after my wife vanished. My world changed just like that. One second you're having coffee and the next, everything's gone.'
She wasn't cowed. She was a brawler, like Rachel. 'So you and your people go around fixing the world, repairing the breaks, sealing rifts-but it'll still be the same old tired Earth, right? Just one with a lot of bandages. It's like trying to reverse time, wake up in the morning younger than you were when you went to sleep. You can't do it. If I was a shrink, I'd say that you guys are trying to fix yourselves. Frankly, that sounds pretty damned futile. There's always more pain.'
'Sure, but you got to have hope. You said it: You think you're never going to smile again. One day, you do-or you trick yourself into thinking you can. Maybe… I don't know, maybe it's the same damned thing. But I can't just do nothing. If I sit around accepting the world the way it is, I might as well have put that bullet into my…' He bit off the rest.
They said nothing for a time. In the quiet, the wind stirred eucalyptus with a papery rustle. Finally, she murmured, 'Do you remember the day you did? Really smiled again? Felt like, okay, this is good, I can go on?'
No fight in her voice now. His chest burned. 'Yeah, I do.'
'When?'
'Today. Now.' The words were out before he could recall them-or maybe he didn't want to. He saw only her aura now, so bright and alive, and his Rachel was dead and there was nothing he could do to bring her back. Yet there was this woman and this place and no one-not even the Rebbe-listening, and the need for her hummed in his veins. 'Here. With you.'
When she didn't respond, he felt like an ass. 'Fuck, I'm sorry. I'm tired. I shouldn't…'
'Shut up,' and then he felt her warm breath slant across his neck. She lifted her face and he sighed into her mouth, and when he dropped his hand to the swell of her breast, she made a sound deep in her throat.
A little later, when she cried out and called him by another man's name, he was past caring. • • •
She lay with her head on his chest. 'How did she die?'
He massaged her scalp. Her hair was silken, her scent spicy. 'The plane vanished. No wreckage. No bodies. Nothing.'
'A rift?'
'I'd like to think so because then she could still be alive on some other metaplane, but…' He paused. 'You remind me of her. It's weird.'
'Yeah, tell me about it.' She pressed her head against his chest again. 'When I saw you, I thought: Lee. How strange is that, that we both have the same experience?'
'Strange.' He laughed. 'You're talking to a guy who does magic.'
'Like, all kinds?'
'Some, but I'm also kind of specialized. I… bind. Sure, I can conjure-banish, hurl a couple energy bolts, stuff like that-but the Rebbe recruits us for our special talents. Binding is mine. I pull and contain wild or free spirits.'
'Exorcism.'
'Sort of. The process has its roots in old Torah mysticism. I bind. Most often it's a spirit, but sometimes it's binding as in sewing, or knitting rips between one metaplane and the next. That legend I told you? Same principle: The Kabbalist literature's riddled with stories about shedim bound in mountains, or deep in the oceans.'
'And you guys put them back? But how do you contain it until you can…?' Abruptly, she pushed up and stared down into his face. 'You. You're the vessel. You're the bottle they put the genie into.'
'For a while, yeah. You know, it's really not as horrible as you think.' That was a lie; it was awful, like being pregnant with some kind of beaky monster gnawing at his insides. Only the Rebbe had the power to dispel, so until Daniel returned to Safed, he endured. Every encounter depleted him, left him weak as a kitten and his mana stained by evil. The Rebbe said that he was a living embodiment of a quelippah, the shell within which evil might be contained and then purified. Daniel's life with Mossad, the secrets he'd carried and the people and metahumans he'd killed, had toughened him-or marked him, he was never sure, and he still suffered. Given his past, maybe that was okay.
'What about reincarnation?' she asked.
'What about it?'
'Do you believe in it? Because I got to tell you, what you do, this binding stuff, taking in spirits… it feels the same.'
Was it? He had never summoned a spirit, though he knew the mashiva, the summoning incantation. But summoning was forbidden to him as it was to all the Rebbe's followers. Not that spirit possession was undesirable: He knew many in the Rebbe's circle who continually strived to make themselves pure enough to become ibbur, to host the soul of another. There were stories from long ago of acolytes who dug shallow graves alongside the tombs of the righteous and prayed to be so invaded if only for a short time. But the Rebbe was clear: Their job
