Choose your enemies carefully

PART 3

The chittering voices of the leshy grated on Hart's nerves. Hart knew her nervousness was adding to the irritation caused by the humanoids. Irritated or not, she had never liked them or their leafmold smell. However, they were the best choice for the task of carrying the bier on which Sam's body lay. Though the body was concealed beneath a cloth-covered framework, the bearers would know what they carried. The other servants of the Seelie Court would spread gossip. Of course, the leshy would too, but few courtiers ever bothered to pay attention to leshy babblings.

So far she had managed to avoid undue notice since her arrival in Ireland. Bambatu had arranged for the landing pad to be deserted. No doubt he'd had a hand in ensuring that the passages through which she passed were nearly empty as well. The few courtiers she encountered either were too busy with their own business to pay much attention to the covered bier, or were cowed by her cold stare. No one hindered her passage.

The designated court was one of a myriad of open spaces in the gloomy half-forest, half-palace that was Lady Deigh's stronghold. A soft, sourceless light defined a circle just over three meters in diameter. The st of the court was shrouded in darkness. Its floor was moss-covered earth, and Hart sensed great boughs arching over her head, although she could see nothing in the darkness above her.

The rectangular doorway through which they entered the clearing seemed to vanish after they passed through. Hart walked to the circle and stopped on the far side. The leshy carrying the bier almost tumbled their burden to the ground in their haste to stop when she did. She ordered them to set it down and dismissed them. Like children released from school, they scattered, laughing, in all directions.

The clearing grew quiet. The leshy hadn't used the doorway to leave, but Hart suspected she would find the darkness impenetrable.

Hart drank in the silence, using its power to calm herself. Before long, a new rectangle appeared, framing an elven woman. The backlighting silhouetted her slim figure through the diaphanous gown she wore. Hart felt a twinge of envy at the perfection of line and form in the woman's body. For all the illusion in which her court was cloaked, Lady Brane Deigh used none to improve her own appearance.

The Lady stepped forward and the rectangle vanished, restoring the illumination in the clearing to its original low level. She acknowledged Hart's bow with a slight nod of her head, but her eyes remained fixed on the covered bier as she crossed through the darkness and into the light. As soon as Deigh reached the bier, she drew back the cloth. "He breathes."

The surprise Hart had hoped to engender was absent from the Lady's voice. Instead there was a slight hint of annoyance. A dangerous hint. Lady Diegh turned her face to Hart, her green eyes almost luminous.

"Is this how you fulfill your orders, milessaratish? "

"A milessaratish serves her mistress. I sought only to further your desires, Lady." "By disobeying orders?"

"A good servant fulfills the desire of her mistress rather than the letter of the request. I was told that you wished that the runners stop harassing the Hidden Circle. Was that not correct?"

"It was correct," the Lady said softly without looking at Hart.

Hart could feel the chill. The earth beneath her feet felt like ice. Fragile ice.

"Killing Verner would not have achieved this end. I have worked with them and know them. They would only have redoubled their efforts seeking to avenge Verner's death. But with him missing, they shall be unsure. More likely they will search for him instead of the Circle."

The Lady finally turned her emerald eyes on Hart.

"So you have arranged for them to bother me."

"They will find no connection," Hart said hastily. "I used reliable people who have no connection with the Shidhe."

"If your reputation is half true, you could have made him disappear without bringing him here." "Yes. But dead, he has no further use." There was the slightest thawing in the Lady's attitude as she said. "And alive, he does?"

"Circumstances have changed before; they may again. Verner is a ready weapon to send against the Hidden Circle should their actions fail to fulfill your expectations. If he were dead, you would need to find and hone another tool."

The Lady was silent. Hart wondered if she had made the wrong play. Deigh did not like surprises, nor did she like subordinates with too much initiative.

"I do not like being disobeyed, Hart. You were told that Verner was to die."

"I was told that the actions of the runners against the druids must be disrupted. I took that as the primary goal to be achieved. Verner's death was suggested as the most expedient method of achieving that end, but I saw another way to achieve the goal and retain options. My evaluation of the situation was that his death would jeopardize the primary objective.

"Verner's death would be an irrevocable step. His disappearance could still be just as effective. If he were to remain here in Ireland, no one need know he is still alive, and I can arrange that the world outside your court believe that he is dead. Captivity in place of death maintains his value as a pawn in your schemes. The renegade druids of the Hidden Circle have proven to be resourceful and unpredictable foes. Should circumstances arise in which Verner's skills and talents would be of use, he will be available. If he dies, he ceases to be a factor, and you will have permanently expended a potential resource."

"You were thinking of my best interests, then?"

"Yes, Lady."

"Hmmm." The Lady studied Sam's face. A sly smile flitted across her lips. "I begin to see possibilities in what you have done. Mortals can be so… entertaining."

Hart found herself bothered by the Lady's words, and even more by the possible motivations behind Deigh's fleeting smile. Hart hadn't brought Sam here only to have him become a plaything for a jaded tart who deluded herself about her immortal elven heritage.

She was surprised at herself, not just at the emotion she felt but at the very fact that she was feeling emotion at all. Jealousy was foreign to her; the hot, angry thoughts that flooded her now were disturbing. But she could not express her feelings. It would be too dangerous for Sam. And for her.

"You will let him live?"

The Lady gave a slight shrug. "Your arguments have some small merit, but I must also consider how it will look. My word is law in the court and you disobeyed orders."

"Only to serve you better. Such disobedience is no crime in the eyes of a wise ruler.''

Deigh regarded her sidewise. "As long as the servant is wise as well."

"I believe that I have done nothing to compromise you. And I have my own reputation to consider."

"Ah, reputation. Such a strange master and servant," the lady said wistfully. "You have staked more than your reputation here. Do you think you know me so well that you can rely on my forgiveness?"

Hart knew that the wrong answer to the question could be dangerous. Had she read the Lady wrong? Hoping that Deigh was just playing games, Hart steadied her nerves and spoke.

"I spent weeks in the court before you sent me after the Hidden Circle. I listened to your subjects. Even before I took your contract, I researched you as well as I could, I know you for a strict disciplinarian. But I also know you for an intelligent woman and ruler. You would not throw away an advantage, especially so potentially useful an advantage, over such a small matter as the interpretation of orders. Only your loyal Bambatu and I know the wording of your orders. I have nothing to gain by talking and he has even less. You have something to gain and nothing to lose by accepting the situation as stands."

"I do not stand in need of a lecture," the Lady snapped in sudden anger. She turned on her heel and strode toward the space from which she had entered. The rectangle of light appeared before her. On its threshold she spun and faced Hart again. "And if there is a problem?"

"I guarantee my work," Hart said, looking directly into the Lady's eyes.

Lady Deigh smiled coldly. "Work such as yours is only guaranteed with lives, Hart. Yours shall stand for his."

Hart lowered her gaze. "I understand."

"I don't think you do, but I accept your guarantee.

He shall live for now. On my terms."

Lady Deigh gestured; the bier on which Sam lay lifted from the ground and floated away from Hart into the darkness that surrounded the clearing. Hart's elven eyes couldn't pierce the gloom beyond the first few meters. Even shifting to astral senses only revealed the hulking spirits carrying the bier. She watched anxiously as the gloom hid Sam from her sight. When Hart looked toward the doorway, the Lady was gone as well.

Had she done the right thing?

Sam awoke to the gentle whisper of someone praying.

He tried to sit up, but the sudden flash of pain in his head doomed his eifort. His return to the horizontal wasn't fast enough to satisfy his stomach; it lurched and heaved. Sam rolled onto his side just in time to spew the contents mostly onto the floor rather than himself.

He groaned.

"Ah, you are awake."

A man in dark clothing appeared at Sam's side. The man had a ceramic bowl in one hand and some towels in the other. Without asking, he started to help Sam clean himself off.

Sam let the man take over the job. His head still hurt, almost as bad as after a long session in the Matrix. That was an old familiar pain. It would pass. His belly felt acid-scorched and his muscles ached. He felt like drek. Through the wool that seemed impacted around his teeth and tongue, he asked, "What happened?"

"That I cannot tell you. My first sight of you was when the servants brought you here. From your condition, I'd say you had been drugged."

Hart. In his memory, Sam could see her saddened face hovering over the muzzle of her Crusader. He saw the muzzle flash and felt the slug hit. But it couldn't have been a slug. If it had, he would have been dead. She must have loaded her weapon with tranquillizer bullets. Why? What was going on?

Sam looked around. There wasn't much to see. Rough stone walls defined a circular chamber about three meters in diameter. A small alcove held a pool of water. The walls were beaded with moisture and spotted with patches of luminous lichen. Puzzled that he couldn't feel the humidity or smell the mold, Sam shifted briefly to astral senses. The change in sensory input disoriented him; there seemed to be a severe fuzziness to his perceptions, but he learned that the walls' appearance was an illusion. He and the stranger were being held in a modern cell. The illusory lichens hid lighting panels; the real walls were concrete and embedded with some kind of high-tech circuitry which frustrated his attempts to penetrate with his astral vision. He felt too weak to press the issue, and returned to his mundane senses. If the man with the cloths had noticed Sam's absence, he gave no sign. "Where are we?" Sam asked. "In general, somewhere south and west of Dublin.

In specific, a holding cell in the stronghold of the Seelie Court."

"Dublin?" Sam was stunned. His mind didn't want to work. "Dublin, Ireland?"

"Yes." The man tossed the dirty cloths into the bowl. "You seem surprised."

"Confused would be a better word. You'd be, too. I was shot in London."

"Shot?" The man's eyes grew concerned as he began to search Sam for a wound. Sam was too spaced to do anything. "Ah, the drug. You were shot with a tranquilizer gun, then." Sam thought he nodded in the affirmative. "It would seem that you have not slept too long, judging from the condition of your last meal. Who shot you and why?"

He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to think about it. Hart had shot him down. Why? Without a word of explanation, she had shot him. Then, he had awoken a captive. Had the bitch sold him to his enemies? They had been lovers; he hadn't thought she could be so cold. He had loved her. He really didn't want to think about it. "I don't want to talk about it." "Then we shall not speak of it. Perhaps though, it would not trouble your memories to recall when you were shot. I no longer have a timepiece, and I have lost track of the days here. The light, you see, doesn't change and the meals are irregular. There is no way to measure the passage of the time here."

Time? Sam realized he had lost track of time himself. The long days of tracking down the Hidden Circle had all blended into one another. He had barely noted the passage of Christmas and the coming of the new year. The last date he recalled clearly was the Solstice; the Man of Light's words had burned the date into his mind.

"It was late January, the twenty-ninth, I think."

"The twenty-ninth." The man sighed. "It's been over a week and the others have not found me. If the elves' magics are so strong that I have not heard from them by now, I fear I never will. These elves do the devil's work."

Sam's head was slowly clearing. He listened to the man's words, but they only made partial sense. "Who are you?''

"I? I am a sinner who answers to the name Pietro Rinaldi. I am also a priest of the Order of St. Sylvester, and, for the sin of inattention, a captive like yourself."

"You're a priest? But this is Ireland. I thought all the priests had been kicked out when the Shidhe took over.''

"I am but lately come to these shores."

"Not a very good start for your missionary work."

"Missionary work is not my calling. Although it is the task of all priests to aid souls toward salvation, the Order of St. Sylvester has another mandate. I am part of an investigative team. While my fellows concentrated on England, I came to Ireland seeking information. I had assumed that the diplomatic pass from His Holiness would have been better respected. Alas, the arrogant leaders of this state seem to have no concept of any authority higher than their own."

"So, you showed up at the airport, and they took one look at your Vatican passport and chucked you in this hole.''

"Quite the contrary. I was admitted without any trouble at all. It was not until after I had begun my inquiries that I attracted the attention of the Lady Deign."

"Who?"

"Lady Brane Deigh, a very rich and powerful elven woman who styles herself queen of the Seelie Court."

"Whoa, father. You're not telling me you're here because you got involved with a woman, are you?"

"Involved with?" Rinaldi blinked in brief confusion, then smiled wryly. "Ah. Yes, involved indeed, but not in the way you think. Since the Reunification, celibacy is no longer required of priests, but my Order still takes the vow for ritual reasons. I have not broken that vow. My fall came not from the temptations of the flesh; my involvement with the Lady, as they call her, was one of matters more arcane than carnal."

"Arcane? Are you going to tell me that you're a magician, too?"

Rinaldi chuckled. "Would it matter if I did?"

"It might."

"Then I hope it is not too much of a disappointment, but I am not. I am a sensitive, however, and so know that you are one, yourself." Rinaldi paused, offering Sam a chance to say something. When he did not, the priest tried another tack. "My limited gifts do not tell me your name."

Sam was embarrassed. Here he had been grilling Rinaldi and had never even introduced himself. He started to give his name, but sudden suspicion stopped his tongue. Names were important, both magically and in the world of the shadows. How did Sam know if this priest-if he was a priest-was who he said he was? Rinaldi had admitted to being involved with this elf queen, Deigh. Maybe his involvement hadn't ended. He might be one of Deigh's flunkies and the whole friendly approach some kind of trap. The suspicion gnawed at Sam, and he hated himself for it.

It had been bad enough when Dodger manipulated |him, but what Hart had done… her perfidy was shattering. It made him want to believe the Man of Light's implication that their affair had been induced by magic. but magic wasn't causing his feelings now. The anger and pain made mock of any attempt to accept that his feelings for Hart had not been real.

First Dodger, then Hart. Too many betrayals. Could he trust anyone?

"They call me Twist, father," he said softly into the silence. He could see that he hadn't hidden his inner struggle from Rinaldi, but the priest politely ignored it.

"Ah. A street name?"

Sam nodded.

"I understand that the current circumstances do not inspire trust. However, we are both in the same cell and I believe that you might have the power to get us out. Perhaps if I tell you more about myself, you will trust me. Read my aura, if you wish. I have nothing to hide."

Getting out was a top priority, but Sam still felt too weak to do more than sit up and breathe deeply. He didn't feel ready to read anyone's aura, but he didn't have to tell Rinaldi that. Until he was stronger and had a better idea of what was going on, he could at least listen to the priest's words. "Sure. Why not?"

Rinaldi's idea of filling Sam in began far too early to be of any real interest. Sam had no desire to hear about the priest's rough childhood in Awakening-torn Italy. What relevance could it have? Sam let his mind drift, occasionally dropping back to the real world to pick up snatches of Rinaldi's early tribulations with his vocation and final selection of the rule under which he had chosen to live. It was only when Rinaldi revealed the nature of the Order of St. Sylvester that the priest recaptured Sam's full attention.

"You're part of an order of magicians? " Sam asked incredulously.

"I said that the Sylvestrines gather the cream of the

Church's magical talent, but not all members are magically active and most of the rest are adepts or students. I myself have but a small gift."

"Which is?"

"I have astral senses."

Rinaldi looked embarrassed, or perhaps, troubled. Sam felt sympathy for him. Any magical talent set a person apart from ordinary folk. But to see the magic and not be able to use it? What frustration! Sam didn't think he would be able to deal with that kind of limitation.

"That's a valuable talent," Sam said.

Rinaldi shrugged, giving Sam a weak smile.

"I am primarily a scholar. My specialty is totemic shamanism, but I have studied several hermetic traditions as well. While I have done some investigations of other more esoteric traditions, I would hesitate to claim any particular expertise. There is so much knowledge, and so little time to acquire it.

' 'I have spoken long enough about myself and fear I shall have to confess my prideful indulgence. You seem more relaxed now. Perhaps you feel secure enough to tell me what tradition you follow.''

"Can't you tell?"

"Without you actively using your magic? Of course not."

Sarn felt stupid. With his limited experience, he already knew that a person's aura only snowed strength. While those with strong auras were often magically capable, it didn't show unless they were actively manipulating mana. Even then, the tradition they followed might not be clear unless the nature of the magic was strongly allied in the form of manipulation.

"I appear to be a shaman."

Rinaldi looked surprised. "Appear to be? I should think that someone with your level of power would be quite aware of his orientation."

"It's what people tell me I am," Sam said sheepishly. "Honestly, father, I find the idea uncomfortable. I'm a Christian. All the business about totems is very disturbing to me. I mean, didn't primitive people worship totems as gods? I can't do that. It just doesn't seem right that my magic is hedged around with such pagan symbolism."

Sam's breathless admission seemed to shift Rinaldi's mood. His expression became more serious. "Do you believe in angels?" "What's that got to do with anything?" "Do you?" Rinaldi insisted. "They are in the Bible," Sam snapped. "Some people do not believe the Bible is literal truth," Rinaldi said calmly. "Do you believe that angels are real?" Sam hesitated. "Yes." "And what are they?"

"How should I know? I'm not a theologian." Rinaldi smiled. "If it makes you feel any better, theologians argue over angels, too. Most agree that an: angel is a being, a spiritual entity of a different order Jthan man. I believe that true knowledge of these beiings is something that is denied to us as long as we wear flesh.

"In our mortal state, we cannot know the mind of God. Though we each have a sliver of him within ourselves, we are hampered by our physical nature from seeing the truth as it is. For all the wonder and glory of God's creation, we perceive only a part. You, as a magician, are able to perceive more than the vast majority of mankind. You used your astral senses earlier. Didn't you see more than your mundane senses revealed? Of course you did. A small proof that what is available to mundane senses is not all there is to the universe. You have assensed spirits that have no physical presence, haven't you? Aren't they real?"

"They're just energy forms," Sam protested. "It's not the same thing." "E=mc2. Energy is as real as matter." Rinaldi's answer was smug, and troubling. "Are you telling me that totems are angels?"

The priest shook his head. "No. Yet I know of no shaman who does not believe in their existence."

So, was Sam supposed to believe that totems had independent existence? "Then totems are not just psychological constructs, tricks to let a brain do magic?" "I didn't say that either."

"You're making me crazy, father," Sam said exasperatedly. "What are totems? Are they real or not?" "I wish I could give you the answer you want, Twist. I'm not a shaman, so I can never experience a totemic contact or visit the realms where shamans learn the secrets of their magic. The ability to experience such has not been given to me, and the shamanic magic is so very experiential. While in this flesh, I shall never personally know the answer, but all those I have spoken to agree that whether totems are real or not, the effects of totems are real. A shaman must conform to the attitudes and strictures of his totem or lose power.'' "You're telling me that I must follow my totem's decrees. What about God's commandments? What about false gods, priest?"

"A totem is suited to your nature, or your nature to it. The order is unclear. Like the very ability to do magic, or the type of magic of which a person is capable, totems are not something that is chosen. A person is as God has made him, gifted or burdened as He wills. We must use our gifts and shoulder our burdens as we attempt to find our way nearer to Him. He has given us free will that we may choose, and He has given us His love to guide us in choosing wisely. Accepting your shamanic nature will not drive you from Him. Your gift comes from Him. How could He make you so that you are unacceptable to Him?"

Sam felt the wisdom in the priest's words. He said thoughtfully, "I should have spoken to you sooner, father.''

Rinaldi smiled warmly. "Regrets gain nothing, son.

You must look to the future."

"Easy to say," Sam said with a wave of his hand taking in their cell. He shrugged and said, "So when Dog speaks to me, it's not a betrayal of God."

"Your totem is a link with…" Rinaldi quick answer died abruptly. "Did you say your totem speaks to you?"

"Yeah. He doesn't always make sense and sometimes he talks too much."

Rinaldi put a hand on Sam's shoulder and stared earnestly into his face. "But he talks directly to you? In words?"

"How else does anybody talk? Other than dragons, that is."

"I don't know; I've never spoken to a dragon."

"Try to avoid it. They're accomplished liars," Sam said. Bitterly, he added, "Like elves."

"Twist, how many times have you spoken with… was it 'Dog'?"

Rinaldi, intent with his own thoughts, had paid no attention to Sam's sour tone. Sam forced thoughts of her lies away and tried to answer Rinaldi civilly. "Dog sure enough; he kind of looked like a mutt I once befriended. I guess we've had three or four conversations now. He teaches me songs. Crazy, isn't it?"

"No, not at all," Rinaldi said. He thought for a moment then said, "When was the last time?"

"Just before she… just before I got shot."

"You were facing death?"

"That was later." Sam laughed nervously. "I guess

I'm a little confused, and I'm confusing you. Must be the aftereffects of the drug. When I talked to Dog, Herzog had been helping me break through to the spirit planes. He wouldn't help us against the Circle, but he was willing to take me through the ritual so I could get the power I needed to face the Circle's abominations."

"The Circle? What circle?"

"A bunch of renegade druids who call themselves the Hidden Circle. They're homicidal manics. My…, " Sam paused, "… friends and I were trying to stop them."

"Twist," Rinaldi said softly. "Tell me about this

Hidden Circle."

Why not, Sam thought. If he and Rinaldi were really captives of elves, nothing would get back to the Circle. Sam knew how much the druids hated metahumans; these elves wouldn't be allied with the Circle. If Rinaldi's presence and the "elven captivity" were some kind of subtle ploy, what did it matter? Sam was on his own now, and even Dog's songs wouldn't be enough if he were in the Circle's hands.

Sam recounted his involvement with the Circle's machinations, beginning with the bungled extraction of Raoul Sanchez and ending with the disastrous raid in the East End of London. The priest's questions were sharp and probing. Sam's answers seemed to disturb Rinaldi. Throughout the tale, Sam observed the priest's growing agitation. If he was an actor, he was very, very good.

Rinaldi listened to Sam's recounting of the runners' speculations as to the druids' plans, then said, "Twist, we've got to get you out of here."

Sam could see the intensity in the priest's face. Sam revised his opinion. Rinaldi had spoken freely and offered aid without asking a reward. If Sam rejected that kind of selflessness, he would never be able to trust anyone again. But then, was trust important to a shad owrunner? Sam was surprised that he didn't need to think about it long.

"Call me Sam, father."

Sam and Rinaldi talked for hours before the grindting rasp of the opening cell door interrupted them. A* pale-skinned elf entered as soon as the door had risen high enough to clear the shock of yellow and pink hair ethat stood straight up from his scalp. His pointed ears! were especially prominent against the shaved sides of his head. Though his manner was nonchalant, Sam noticed that the elf kept a hand near the weapon holtstered low on his right hip.

The elf stepped to one side of the doorway and a ishort, squat shape took his place in the arch. Their fsecond visitor was neither an ape nor a man, but someling in between. Thick brown fur sheathed its torso land lower legs, while a fine, sparse fuzz covered the f rest of its body. The digits of its hands and feet had sharp, thick nails that were almost talons. The narrow, broad-nosed face shifted expression from fearful skitteriness to a threatening snarl and back again. It wore no clothes, but carried a bundle of cloth from which Sam could see the soles of a pair of boots projecting. The elf grunted at the hominid and pointed at Sam. The furred being crouched at the sound of the elf's voice and looked at him. It made a few guttural noises. The elf repeated the sound he had made more loudly and jabbed his hand emphatically in Sam's direction. The creature shuffled forward, side-stepping toward Sam, and rapidly shifted its gaze from Sam to the elf.

When it was a meter from Sam, it tossed its burden at him and scampered out of the cell to stand hesitantly just on the other side of the threshold.

Sam caught one of the boots and what seemed to be a shirt of fine white silk. The other boot and the rest of the clothes landed on the floor around him.

"Drek-eating munchkins," the elf muttered. He made a barking noise and stamped his foot in the direction of the hominid. The munchkin bared its teeth at him and hissed, before spinning in place and scampering down the corridor. When it reached a group of its fellows clustered where the corridor forked, it stopped, hopping back and forth as it screeched at the elf. The elf stamped his foot again, and the whole group of munchkins pelted out of sight around the corner.

"Must be tough getting good help around here,"

Sam said as he bent to gather up the fallen garments.

Rinaldi chuckled, but the elf only frowned.

"Dress," he ordered.

"There are only clothes for one. What about Father

Rinaldi?"

"He stays here."

Sam started to protest, but Rinaldi's hand on his arm stopped him.

"It's all right," the priest said. "But you'd better clean yourself up first. You obviously have an interview with the Lady and there's no point in making a bad impression."

"What about you?"

"I expect she's had her fill of me. Go on. I'll still be here when you get back."

Sam had time to think while he showered in the cell's small sanitary alcove. He continued thinking as he put on the clothes that had been brought for him. He had even more time to think on the trip to the audience chamber. He spent most of the thinking puzzling over the why of his capture. He found no answers.

He realized that he knew damn little about Hart. His runner contacts vouched for her competence in the trade and pegged her as a hermetic mage. Both those things he knew were true from his personal experience of her. But the streets had no tale to tell of her origins. She was supposed to be a mercenary, but what if she were not? What if she had been an agent of the Shidhe all along? He knew so little about her past. Although the subject had never come up, he realized that he knew no more about Hart than he did about Sally Tsung. His involvement with Sally had sprung into being almost overnight and become a tempestuous affair quite unlike his earlier involvement with the staid Hanae. Like Hart, Sally was strong-willed and quite sure of what she wanted. Their becoming lovers had been mostly her idea. Mostly. But what of his involvement with Hart? Whose idea had that been?

The Man of Light had preyed on Sam's own loyal impulses when he had suggested that Sam was betraying Sally by his involvement with Hart. But Sam knew Sally had been through lovers before. He doubted she had gone without comfort since he had left Seattle. It just wasn't her style. He was both comforted and disturbed by that thought. She had done a lot in helping him adjust to the shadow life, and he wanted nothing but the best for her, but he had been raised to believe in fidelity.

So what had he been doing fooling around with

Hart?

He didn't have an answer. His feelings roiled under the heat of suspicion planted by the Man of Light. Was it real magic or just the old biochemical magic of hormones and psychological need?

He realized that he didn't know Hart well enough to answer for her. Would she tell him honestly if he talked to her? Could she? That night on the rooftop he had been afraid to tell her everything the Man of Light had said, confining himself to the less personal issues. Still, he remembered how she had shivered when he spoke of the magical compulsion to forget the encounter at Glover's mansion. What had her reaction meant? He didn't know. In truth, he didn't know her at all. He remembered the sadness her eyes had held as she pulled the trigger. Why had she done it? There was so much he didn't know about her. For all he knew, Hart might actually be the Lady Brane Deigh.

Did that explain everything? Anything? He thought about it for a while, too, and finally dismissed it as paranoid fantasy.

The time for ponderings ended as he was ushered into the audience chamber. At the far end of a gauntlet of courtiers was a tiered dais upon which sat three thrones. The right one was occupied\a151the Lady Brane Deigh, he presumed. To the enthroned queen's side stood a tall, dark-skinned elf. Hart stood among the courtiers nearest the dais.

Sam was shoved from behind by the elf accompanying him. After an initial misstep, he strode forward, determined not to show the turmoil he still felt. He ignored the scattered titters from the crowd as he stopped before the triple thrones. He stared defiantly at the queen.

"Why am I here?"

"You are my guest," she replied sweetly.

"Guests aren't kept in cells."

"Let us say, then, that you may be my guest. As such, you shall be given the freedom of the court, but my guests are well-behaved and display courteous manners. Though lately you have associated with less attractive elements of society, you are a child of corporate culture; thus I know you to have been educated in reasonably civilized behavior. Offend none of my

court, and you shall have a long life among us. Prove yourself entertaining or of value, and it shall be a pleasant life."

Not a guest at all, but a prisoner. Or worse, a pet.

"I want no part of your court."

"It is not your choice. Are you so ungrateful as to throw away what the Lady Hart has won for you?"

"Oh, I'm grateful," he said icily, staring at his socalled benefactress. Hart would not meet his eyes. "And I'm sure there are many innocent souls in London who would gladly cry her praises as well. If they could."

"You need not concern yourself over matters in

London."

"Then the Circle is destroyed?" "Broken, certainly. And much of that work was yours. You are resourceful, for a mortal. I like that." Sam didn't believe that the Circle was defeated. They had still been active, and he had heard no evidence to the contrary. So why was the Lady complimenting him? Were elves by nature deceitful? He knew the job wasn't done\a151the renegade druids were still at large.

"You haven't said that they're destroyed; therefore they will still be at their evil work. They must be stopped."

"They will be," the Lady assured him.

"Then you are working to stop the Hidden Circle?" "They will be exposed and their evil seen by all the world. Their crimes are repulsive to all sentients. Public revelation of their evil will shatter their warped dreams of power.''

Sam didn't want to hear vague promises and flowery rhetoric.

"When?" he demanded.

"In time."

Lord Almighty, this woman is playing games with people's lives. She was far more beautiful in body, but no better in soul than Haesslich.

"No! They must be stopped at once. If you are opposed to them, you must act now. People are dying."

The lady's warm manner frosted over. "Do not presume to tell me what to do. You cannot know of the large concerns at stake here, with your mortally limited view of time. Perhaps you should talk some more with Padre Rinaldi. In many ways he is as intense as yourself, but his organization has learned to take the long view. You could learn patience from him; he has learned his place."

"His place? His place is out in the world, not suffocated here as one of your guests. Why is he being held prisoner?''

"He is so very quick of tongue," she said, folding her hands in front of her left breast. Abruptly, a hint of her former warmth returned, "Could it be that he has not told you his tale?"

Suspicious, Sam replied, "He has not."

"Then you see that even he does not consider it any business of yours.''

"I do not believe he has broken any laws. Whatever business it is, you have no right to hold him. Keep me here, if you must," Sam said. If you can, he added to himself. "But set him free."

"You may make no demands here. Never forget that you are an illegal alien in this land. You live on my sufferance." The lady returned her hands to the arms of her throne. "Still, Padre Rinaldi's wit is quick and keen, and his arguments, though insufficiently informed, did amuse me. However, it is not proper for me to arbitrarily rescind his confinement, and I find that I miss him. It is a dilemma."

The dark-skinned elf spoke into her ear. His words were pitched to carry to the audience as well. "The Lady Hart is a member of your court. Perhaps she would sponsor the priest as she has the shaman."

The Lady turned her attention to Hart. "Are you interested, Lady Hart? A toy for your toy?"

Hart didn't look at her mistress immediately. For a moment she stared straight ahead, then her face turned to Sam. Her left eyebrow rose minutely, a silent question. He thought at first to keep his expression passive, to force her to decide without any input from him. Then, he thought about how much harder it would be to plan an escape without Rinaldi; the priest was his only ally here. Sam had no idea of Hart's motivation in bringing him here, but she had certainly not asked his permission to kidnap him. Would asking her to take the priest's part work for or against him? The moment was stretching out uncomfortably. He nodded to Hart.

"I shall stand for the priest," Hart said. Lady Deigh laughed lightly, then smiled expansively. Sam got the sudden feeling that, in some obscure way, he had served Lady Deigh's ends, whatever they were. If this little tableau had cost Hart something, that was only justice. But he had been set up, too, and he didn't like it. In the past, whenever he had been manipulated to serve other people's ends, bad things had happened. The Lady was playing some sort of game here, and she seemed pleased by Hart's acceptance of responsibility for Rinaldi. Sam didn't know enough of what was going on and that worried him.

The Lady rose from her seat, precipitating a rustle in her crowd of attendants as they moved to anticipate her reaction.

"Let there be music," she said. "I would dance."

A soft strain of harp music began, filling the room and seeming to come from everywhere at once. The notes were clear, yet held faint echoes of other songs.

The trill of a flute joined in, adding its lively tones to the ethereal sweetness of the melody. A drum slipped in and increased the tempo as the Lady stepped up to Sam and held out her hand.

"Dance with me, Samuel Verner."

Not knowing what else to do, Sam took her delicate fingers in his own. He felt coarse and awkward as she turned him toward the open floor, but a sudden flood of insight brought him the steps of the dance. He tasted the magic of the subconscious instruction and knew that the Lady's strong will powered it. She would not be embarrassed by an untutored partner. They were soon whirling across the floor, feet flashing in the rhythms of the jig. Pairs of elves followed behind them; each courtier strove to outdo his or her partner, and each couple attempted to outshine rival couples with the intricacy of their footwork. None danced with such flair or elegance as the Lady herself.

Hart did not join the dance. Each time Sam's gaze swept across her position, he found her cold bronze eyes following him and the Lady across the floor. The music seemed to go on for hours, and Sam danced, but he didn't feel his exhaustion until the music finally ended on a wild, shrill clash. Panting, Sam looked around. He didn't see Hart among the milling courtiers.

Days passed. Or at least Sam thought they did. Time seemed to be a mutable commodity in the illusionridden palace of the Shidhe. After that first interview with Lady Deigh, Sum had seen nothing of the ruler of the palace. Hart he had seen, but not talked to; every time he approached her, she slipped away.

Father Rinaldi was his near constant companion. The two wandered the halls, groves, and shadowed passages of the Seelie Court, talking. As soon as the priest was released from the cell, Sam had demanded the reason for Rinaldi's imprisonment. The priest had revealed that he was investigating rumors of renegade druids. When his attempts to gather knowledge from the Irish elves had uncovered the existence of the Hidden Circle, his welcome had come to an end. Lady Deigh had called for an interview and Rinaldi had revealed too great an interest in the subject. Apparently, the Lady had her own plans, though the priest had no idea of their content. She had ordered him imprisoned. The priest had not spoken of his involvement in the affairs of the Hidden Circle earlier for fear that Sam would distrust him as an agent of the cabal.

They concluded that the elves had thrown them together in the hopes that they would reveal things about the Circle. Sam didn't know what he knew that the elves didn't. He suspected that they knew more by far and were just being cautious. Once Sam and Rinaldi discovered they were opposing the same adversaries, they postponed their discussions until Sam, with the help of Rinaldi's theoretical knowledge, managed to adapt one of Herzog's spells to cloak them in silence. Protected from prying ears, they pooled their knowledge and reached the conclusion that they needed to escape confinement as soon as possible. The renegade druids had to be stopped.

They wandered the halls of the palace, alert for anything that might offer an opportunity of escape. They knew they were followed, usually by a single elf; the watchers made little secret of their surveillance. Follow they did, but the watchers did not interfere unless Sam and Rinaldi strayed towards one of the zones forbidden to them. At such times, the lone watcher was rapidly reinforced by other elves with munchkin minions who blocked the prisoners' path and ordered them to turn back. They were never told why they were not allowed to proceed further. Sam maintained that they had gotten too near the outer precincts, but Rinaldi seemed more inclined to think that they had only approached some reserved sector.

Three times the great tables in the main hall were replenished with the elaborate meals Sam had dubbed "dinner" before he and Rinaldi stumbled upon a service passageway that led to a space under the open sky. The Shidhe's cloak of illusion made the open space appear to be a natural clearing in a forest. The confusing fog of active magic was weaker in that place, and Sam's astral senses let him pierce the masking spell to see open space as it was: a modern helipad designed to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo craft. Four more "dinners" passed before Sam, using some of Dodger's tricks and paying a terrible price in headaches, managed to tease a transport schedule from the palace computer. system while the watcher thought he was reviewing library files.

From that list, they learned of a regular cargo shuttle run. Sam was relieved to see that the aircraft assigned to the run was an Ares Wyvern, a small single-rotored cousin of the massive twin-rotored Dragon that seemed to be the mainstay of the Irish helicopter transport fleet. He wasn't sure he would be able to handle the big ship; he was nervous enough about trying a small helicopter even with the help of the sophisticated autopilot with which Ares equipped their aircraft.

Sam and Rinaldi started taking irregular walks, making sure that their paths frequently took them near junctions close to the service passage. They honed their plan to hijack the Wyvern and use it to cross the Irish Sea to England. Periodically, they checked the palace computer system's bulletin board, watching for the dummy message that was the signal from the knowbot Sam had left monitoring the cargo schedule. Sooner than they dared hope, the Wyvern arrived. They redirected their path, hoping that they still appeared to be wandering aimlessly while they were in fact taking as direct a route as possible to the landing pad. They wanted to time their arrival to coincide with its final clearances for takeoff, and they didn't have much time.

Two archways from the pad, they ducked into the shadows on the side nearer their goal and waited for the elf who had been following them. Their watcher had grown complacent; he stepped through the archway totally unsuspecting. Sam's punch took him cleanly in the belly. The elf folded, gasping for air. Grabbing handfulls of collar and of pants, Sam directed the elf into the wall. Sam winced at the crunch the elf made but was relieved to see his knees buckle. The elf sprawled on the floor, unmoving. "Let's go," Rinaldi urged.

Sam tore his eyes from the fallen elf and followed the priest down the corridor. They cut through another arch into a more crowded thoroughfare. It was torture to move at the more sedate pace, but Sam knew they had to do it. He felt that the elves and other beings they passed were aware of what he had done, what he and the priest were trying to do. But despite his fears, no one tried to stop them.

At last they reached the side passage that would take them to the landing space they had discovered. It was a service corridor lined with crates and parcels and bereft of the cloaking illusions so prevalent in the Shidhe palace. This stretch of passage might have been in any airport in any metroplex. Once through the illusion that hid the corridor's mundanity and assured that the way was clear, they ran.

They couldn't have timed their arrival at the arch to the landing pad any better. Through the cockpit windows of the cargo helicopter, they could see the pilot going through his preflight checks. Fortunately for the escaping prisoners, the pilot had set his craft down so that the boarding ladder was turned toward them. The bulk of the Wyvern screened the ladder from the controllers' blockhouse.

Focusing his concentration, Sam cast the spell to project the words he whispered into the pilot's headset. He held his breath, praying for success. He swallowed hard as the pilot tapped his headset in apparent frustration over mechanical difficulties. Sam saw the pilot's lips move as the elf asked for a clarification. Refocusing his auditory illusion, Sam whispered again the words he wanted the pilot to hear. To his relief, the elf listened intently, then took off his headset.

The pilot hauled himself out of his flying couch and disappeared into the body of the helicopter. He appeared again in the hatchway, kit bag in one hand. The elf slung the bag over one shoulder before clambering down the ladder. He walked around the nose of the aircraft and headed for the illusory clump of trees and brush that was really the pad's control blockhouse.

Sam allowed himself a sigh of relief before forming the visual illusion that would cloak himself and Rinaldi, making them appear to onlookers as elven pilots. Having seen the flight suit and insignia of the departed pilot made it easier to get the details right. He hoped no ground crew showed up to intercept them. The illusion was purely visual, since overriding one sense was all he could handle. Anyone who touched them would feel the diiference immediately. Even sound could give them away; the imaginary clipboards hanging at their sides would not be making the normal clatter and ground crewmen would not fail to notice that discrepancy.

They stepped onto the tarmac together and tried to look casual. Sam hoped any onlooker would think they were chatting when, in fact, they were watching over each other's shoulder for any sign that they had been unmasked. Sam was sweating by the time they passed the nose of the aircraft and out of sight of the unseen elves in the control booth.

Rinaldi was standing at the foot of the ladder and Sam was halfway up when a cold voice ordered them to freeze. Sam looked down to see the elven pilot emerging from beneath the Wyvern. The elf held an automatic pistol trained on them. For all the awkwardness of clambering out from under the aircraft, the muzzle remained steady, leaving no doubt in Sam's mind that the elf was more than capable of using his weapon. The elf's smile was that of a cat who had just caught a mouse.

"Now just ease yourself down," he said to Sam. "Your work's not too bad for a norm. The aural bit had good resolution, even if you had me wondering why O'Neill had gotten so formal all of a sudden. You really need work on your visuals, though. It was a good likeness, but even if it hadn't been me who saw you, you would have been hosed. Should have varied the spell for the old guy; I'm not twins."

Rinaldi had to move aside to clear space for Sam. The elf didn't react to priest's motion; his attention was mostly focused on Sam. Thus, the pilot was wide open when Rinaldi snapped his foot up into a kick.

The priest's foot connected with the pilot's elbow, wrenching the elf's arm straight. The gun fell from the pilot's suddenly numb hand. Before the weapon hit the ground, Rinaldi stepped toward the elf and grabbed his arm. Jerking the pilot forward, Rinaldi drove his knee upward. Air whooshed out of the elf and he started to collapse, and Rinaldi helped him down by slamming his left elbow into the base of the elf's neck. The pilot's head snapped back and he hit the concrete chin first. Sam heard teeth and bone snap.

Rinaldi snatched up the gun and tossed it to a surprised Sam.

"Don't stand there," Rinaldi said. "Get in the helo."

"But you…"

"Did what had to be done."

Rinaldi bent down and slipped his hand into the elf's armpits and started to drag him toward the ladder.

Hart knew she was lucky to be the first one to find Donahue. She bent over to check him out. He had been assigned to follow Sam and the priest and had run afoul of them. The signs were obvious. No one in the court would have run him into the wall, or if they had, they wouldn't have left him in one piece. Sam was trying to escape.

Donahue groaned. Hart straightened and stepped away from him, so that when he emptied his stomach, she was well clear. He started to roll over, but she whispered a spell. In his weakened state, he had little resistance and succumbed to the enforced sleep she pressed upon his mind. She tapped the hall's illusions, extending them, to cover the sprawled body. Stretching an existing illusion was something that she couldn't do anywhere, but the mana-rich environment of the palace allowed certain liberties to be taken. The mask was an imperfect job, but it might delay discovery of the sleeping Donahue for a few minutes.

She checked the passageway and found it still deserted. Sam had chosen his ambush site well. Sam and the priest certainly hadn't passed her, so they had to be somewhere ahead. She took a moment to set her ally spirit Aleph on overwatch, warning it to watch specifically for Sam. Then, she hurried down the corridor, trusting her mundane senses to warn her of non-magical problems.

She could do no more than pick archways at random, because there was no way to tell what path the fugitives had chosen. As she crossed a threshold and heard the distant whine of a helicopter engine, she guessed their destination and suspected she was too late. She ran.

She hit the clearing as the landing gear of the Ares Wyvern lifted from the pad. She could see Sam at the controls in the cockpit. He saw her, too, and smiled savagely.

Hart ducked back through the archway and pressed against the wall of the service passage. No alarms clamored. No one shouted to her. Sam had hijacked the helicopter successfully and she seemed to be the only one who knew. It was important that she not be seen here.

She didn't have much time before the Lady learned what had happened. Hart herself could tell Deigh, but she didn't know if the Lady would have her killed before or after they shot down the helicopter. When aroused, the Seelie Court could be every bit as ruthless as their less seemly cousins of the Unseelie Court. A violated parole and a stolen aircraft would certainly anger the Shidhe.

Hart had taken responsibility for Sam and the priest.

Their escape was her failure, her responsibility;

Sam moved down the aisle, checking faces. The craft swayed as it continued its taxi. Fringes on his jacket's arms brushed across the tops of the outer seats as he passed, occasionally flicking into the face of one of the seated passengers. No one complained.

Was Sanchez really on-board? The passenger manifest Dodger had boosted had said that he was. The man should have reacted to the code words, but he hadn't. Maybe he was scared, getting cold feet now that his escort away from cozy corporate security had arrived. Sam was annoyed. What did Sanchez have to be afraid of? His corporate exile would only be temporary. Mr. Johnson had a comfy hideyhole all ready, and in a week or two Sanchez would be back at work, safe and sound in his new corporate home.

Three rows from the forward bulkhead, Sam found Sanchez. He was staring fixedly ahead, sweating. The corporate's hands were rigidly gripping the arms of his seat. Sam spoke the man's name, but was ignored. Reaching out a hand to shake Sanchez, Sam was surprised when the man shrank away,

"Come on, Sanchez. We don't have time to fool around."

Sanchez finally turned his head to look at Sam. The man's dark eyes stared, wide and full of terror. He swallowed convulsively before saying, "Please. I have done nothing."

Sam didn't know what to say.

"Frag it, Twist. If that's the suit, get him moving." Jason moved up the aisle as he spoke. Reaching the perplexed Sam, he stretched an arm past and pulled Sanchez to his feet. "Last thing we need is getting hosed cause the suit's gone limp."

Jason shoved his gun muzzle under Sanchez's chin, forcing his head up. "You don't jerk us. Comprende, chummer?"

"Please, senor. Do not shoot," Sanchez pleaded.

' 'I do not know what you are talking about. I am only a technician. I am not a ahman. I have no access to secrets. I am nobody."

"You'll be nothing but a corpse if you don't get your ass out of here."

Sam reached out to touch Jason's arm but the samurai shifted, placing Sanchez between them. "Jason, I think Settor Sanchez knows less about this run than we do."

"I don't care what he knows. We're taking him out."

Sam frowned. There was more going on here than they knew, and he didn't like what he was thinking. "Otter, check outside. Dodger, anything moving on the air traffic grid?"

"Negative, Sir Twist," the elf replied instantly. He must have been monitoring the conversation through Sam's microphone. When she ducked back in, Otter gave the same report.

So much for his first thought. "Well, whatever the screwup is, it doesn't seem to be a trap. Still, we'd better buzz."

Otter nodded and started to undog the cabin door. Fishface looked as blank as usual, but remained standing where he was, his eyes fixed on Jason. The Indian still gripped Sanchez.

"It stinks. It's got to be a trap and this pedro's a part of it." Jason leaned into his gun, forcing Sanchez's head even further back. "Ain't that right, pedro? Sure it is. You're too nervous. Don't like being the bait when the fish have teeth, do you? I don't like being fooled, pedro."

"Chill it, Jason," Sam snapped. "You've got a gun in his throat. Of course he's nervous. Let's just get him out of here. The sooner we're gone, the better." Jason slowly turned his mirror eyes on Sam. "I say we smoke him. It'll be a lesson."

He himself self will not accept that he has a shamanic calling. He clings desperately to his scientific view of the world."

"Then he has abandoned investigations into his magic?"

"Quite the contrary. He struggles to learn. It's driving Lady Tsung crazy."

Laverty actually looked surprised. "Ms. Tsung is attempting to teach him?"

"Attempting is the right word. Were Sam not so stubborn, he'd see that he and Lady Tsung have incompatible magical orientations."

"Given what you have said, his lack of vision now seems unsurprising. Try to bring him back."

"He won't come. He wants to find his sister first."

"Such loyalty is admirable. And very valuable. But do what you can to bring him here."

With that, Laverty turned and left the library. Estios and Chatterjee followed. Teresa remained standing at the door, making no move to leave. Estios aborted his own exit, and they exchanged a few words, speaking too softly for Dodger to hear. After a few moments, Estios straightened and threw a hostile look in Dodger's direction. Dodger returned a smile, which only infuriated the elf even more. He said one last thing to Teresa before striding angrily through the doorway. Dodger was left alone in the room with Teresa. He waited and she made the first move, walking softly across the carpet to the desk where his cyberdeck lay. Dodger stood as she approached.

She reached a hand past him and took the chip that the machine had extruded. She weighed it in her hand and said, "You seem very fond of this Samuel Verner."

"I have told him that I will help him find his sister."

"You've set yourself another task?"

"A noble quest. We have learned that she was sent to Yomi Island. 'Tis a foul place where the Japanese

send those unfortunate enough to be inflicted with metahuman genes. We would liberate her from such vile durance."

"Once you would have gone charging in." "Yomi is not the sort of place where one could do that easily. There must be preparations. We will go when we are ready. First, we must gain information and credit because transportation, equipment, and muscle are not cheap. While we gather what we need, we hone our skills with shadowruns. Were Sam less fastidious about the runs, we would be further along." She made a tentative motion, almost reaching out to touch him. "You would have made a wonderful paladin."

The old pain seared. Dodger turned his shoulder to her; he did not want her to see the emotions her words had wakened. "I am no paladin. I never will be. I refuse to be twisted to serve any person's will."

"Yet you serve this norm," she said softly.

"I do not serve him. I help him." Dodger turned to look at her, but her face was shadowed under her hair. His hands hung uselessly at his side. "There is all the difference in the world between those two words."

"You always did worry about words." Teresa toyed with the chip. She would not look him in the face. "Why are you helping him?"

"We are friends."

She tilted her head slightly. He could see her pensive expression now, achingly beautiful in its somber composure. Her serious mien shifted into a wistful smile. "We were friends once."

Dodger swallowed hard, "/thought so."

At last she met his gaze. Her eyes were pure emerald and as bottomless as he remembered. He had lost himself in those eyes long ago. He found himself ready to do so again.

"But you left," she said.

Time in the shadows had toughened him, honing away the fat and softness of his corporate life. He opened the door to the apartment, allowing Inu to scamper in through his legs, and found that Inu's excited yapping had done its work. Sally was awake.

"Get enough exercise?" she asked slyly as she tossed back the covers.

He smiled, knowing what kind of exercise she had in mind. "I thought we were supposed to have a lesson this evening."

"Too much work makes Sam too dull." She stretched, testing his resolve. Seeing that he withstood the temptation, she shrugged and pulled on her shorts. "I thought we'd try a conjuring tonight."

Sam frowned. "Why? You know I don't want to do that kind of stuff."

"Every magician needs to know how," Sally said, lacing the strings on her halter. "If you don't know the basics of conjuring, you can't banish an enemy's sending. That's too useful a skill."

"Banishing is sort of like an exorcism, isn't it?" "Give the boy a gold star. Yeah, it's like that but it doesn't have any of the religious nonsense attached." Knowing it was a sore point, Sam said, "Religion is not nonsense."

"Don't start with me." Sally's eyes flashed with adamant heat, then softened. "Anyway, what I wanted to do tonight was to get you an ally spirit."

Sam knew what she meant; he'd done some reading. Perversely, he played dumb. "You mean like a familiar."

"Another star."

"You don't have one," he pointed out. He was surprised by the petulant tone in his voice. From the look on her face, Sally noted it too.

"I'm not hung up on learning magic, either. An ally may be what you need to break this block you've got."

She was not going to give up. Well, neither was he.

"I won't deal with the devil."

"Idiot! There aren't any devils but the ones running the megacorps. Spirits may quibble and bargain, but they're not demons. They're just energy forms cast into a particular construct by the intelligence whose energy forces them to coalesce. They don't have any connections with fallen angels or cosmic malignancies or anything like that. All that drek is stories made up by pasty-faced old men to scare impressionable kids into following orders that are too stupid to defend logically. I thought you had a better mind than that."

"You're entitled to your opinion," Sam said huffily. He knew that most of what was said about spirits being demons was garbage\a151he wasn't a total idiot. "This dealing with spirits just doesn't seem right. Even you say that they talk. That implies sentience, but whether they are free intelligences or not, talking to spirits is just too crazy for me. I had enough of that in those nightmares last summer when I talked to the dog spirit. I haven't had one of those episodes in months, and I don't want to do anything to start them again. I'm just getting back on track. I've put all the troubles that followed Hanae's death into the past where they belong. I don't want to wake that kind of craziness again."

Sally shook her head, her expression hardening into contempt. "You'll never learn with that kind of attitude."

"I'll survive," Sam said defensively. "I've done all right so far."

"Babe, you're in the woods. You're alive 'cause I keep you alive."

Sally might believe it, but Sam knew better. He had learned his lessons. "You weren't there last night."

"And you nearly got smoked."

"We did fine."

Programs, and subsidized communities, while shipping what they considered refuse to the hell they called Yomi. They had seduced Sam from her. Yes, he would refer to her as a kawaruhito, if he referred to her at all.

In just one month Yomi had taught her more about the world and how it worked than her eighteen years in corporate society. The lessons were harsh, but she had learned. She'd had to. Failure meant death. Despite the pain, the rejection, and the horrible realization that she was no longer normal, she had not been ready to die.

She'd learned just how luxurious her former corporate life had been. Renraku menials had a better life than even the self-styled overlords of Yomi. The depths to which the weak and ordinary inmates sank was beyond rational thought. It was just as well that most of those confined to the island didn't remain rational long. She had learned how to survive. Over a year ago her body had changed, and twisted her life into a new pattern. Now, for whatever reason, her body had changed again. Was she condemned to keep changing? God forbid that she was infected with some nasty new type of goblinization that never stopped. She had survived one change and was stronger for it. Thus far, she had coped with the new change, but she didn't know how much she could take. What if she changed yet again?

The face she now saw in the mirror was alien. After her first time, she avoided looking in mirrors, having found the asymmetry of her ork physiognomy repulsive. But her new visage was more regular, though hardly more human. She was finding her new body shape more congenial as well. She had expected to find the fur unbearably warm, but it hadn't been so. Her long limbs were still uncoordinated, making her every movement awkward. She felt ungainly and frus trated at her lack of control. If Shiroi hadn't found her in the Walled City, she would have been prey for the jackals who scoured that garbage heap.

But he had found her and offered help. She had been scared when she had accepted his offer. Scared of her surroundings. Scared of what had happened to her. Scared of trusting him. So she had taken a chance. After all, what did she have to lose?

Now, her life was taking another crazy twist. This time it was a dream instead of a nightmare. Her memories of her "luxurious" corporate life were being tattered to shabbiness. With Renraku, one had to be at least a vice-president of a regional branch to rate a private aircraft such as the one in which she travelled.

The flight was over now. The craft had taxied to a halt and the vibration from the engines had stopped. The pilot emerged from the cockpit, nodding and motioning her forward. His smiled was forced. The rest of the crew was nowhere in sight. She'd be seeing Shiroi soon. Who was he, to command such extravagance?

She rose from her seat. With three long, wobbly strides, she reached the pilot's side. Undogging the toggles, he lifted the latch and swung the cabin door wide. Brilliant sunshine flooded through the opening, forcing her to squint painfully. The cabin's climate control coughed and shuddered into high gear to fight the invasion of hot, humid air. For a moment, she was back on Yomi and she shuddered. Remembering to breathe, she sucked in air. It was thin, and she felt light-headed. Even her new, larger lungs didn't seem to have enough capacity.

The pilot stepped through the hatchway and pressed himself against the railing of the stairway. He seemed to want to give her as much room as possible. Up close, she could smell his fear. What did he think she was going to do? Eat him? Ignoring him, she looked Shidhe's law, her life was forfeit. Only Sam's death at Hart's hands might release her from that harsh judgment.

It took Hart three minutes to run through the halls to her quarters. Worry nagged at her the entire way, almost disrupting the concentration she needed to maintain her invisibility spell. She knew some of the palace's guardian creatures had marked her passage. The damned, cluttering leshy seemed to see her too, but none of the elves she passed were aware. That was good.

There were no guards at her quarters. The alarm had yet to be given. She wasted no time packing, only grabbed the working bag she had kept ready out of old habit. Before leaving the room, she used the computer to log a "do not disturb" order and a delayed order for a meal delivery with the palace household staff. It was a weak ruse, but it might buy a few minutes.

On her way to the outer precincts, she only paused once at a storeroom. The room was supposed to be secure, but she had penetrated better systems. She was in and out at the cost of only a few precious minutes, her bag stuffed with Sam's gear. There were ways to use the items as tracking links.

Just before she hit the outer, public section of the palace, she dropped her invisibility spell. There would be mages on watch at the boundary, and her concealment spell would only mark her as someone to be detained. To her relief, she found at the gate that her privileged status hadn't been revoked. The guards listened dutifully to her story about a trip to the southwest, and even offered her good wishes as she left the building.

She passed through the park surrounding the palace and entered the rail station without incident. Her good fortune held; a train was in the station. She slipped a certified credstick into the turnstile slot and dumped enough nuyen for a month's open pass. The gate opened and she made it to the platform in time to board just as the doors were closing.

By the time the train pulled into the main station in Dublin and she left the car to mingle with the city crowds, she had worked out the bones of her plan. Her first step was to contact her decker Jenny and arrange transport to England. As soon as she secured a little backup, she would intercept Samuel Verner. She was very sure she knew where he was headed.

Dodger had never felt so tired. He stared at the dataplug in his limp hand for a full minute before letting it drop to the idle cyberdeck. He was hungry and his muscles ached from hunching over the cyberdeck. His meat was failing under the strain. Running the Matrix steadily ground a decker down. Trying to do the work of a whole team of deckers changed the grinding wheel of exhaustion from carborundum to diamond grit. He was worn down.

The search for Sam and Hart had been a total bust. The Matrix offered no hints of any operation, and his checks on druid holdings gave no indication that they had anything to do with the sudden disappearance of his fellow runners. Willie had come up with zilch as well. Even Herzog's street contacts had nothing, no matter what price was offered. No avenue Dodger had explored had yielded any information on the platinumhaired lady elf or the brown-bearded American shaman. Neither should have been able to hide for so long in the London sprawl.

Dodger was frustrated. Hart he could take or leave; something about her flashed a warning mode. But Sam… Dodger had gotten him into this mess and now his friend had vanished without a trace. His feelings of guilt were uncomfortable as much for their rarity as Robert N. Charrette for their strength. Those feelings were exaggerated every time he thought about how much time he was spending on the other problem.

The hunt on that issue had turned up only negative clues, but the puzzle drew him like a siren. Driven to look, and repelled at the same time, he haunted the Matrix searching for anything that might tell him more about the Artificial Intelligence that had called itself Morgan le Fay.

Dodger had visited with some of the best deckers in the Matrix, but they knew nothing. The rumor mill at Syberspace was empty. Or rather, it had been when he checked into the virtual club. It wouldn't be now. He knew that he would have started a whirlwind of speculation with his guarded questions. The habitues of the decker club were not stupid\a151nobody stupid could deck through the ice that armored that exclusive little Matrix hideout. His fellow Matrix runners would guess what he had hinted at and begin looking for themselves. Soon someone would know.

Or would they? Was the AI too good for mortal deckers? Could it hide in the Matrix in ways beyond any decker ability to detect? He wished he knew.

All he knew was that Renraku still had not announced the Artificial Intelligence's existence to the world. That meant that something in their program had fouled up. If they were sole owners of a functioning AI, they should be media-blitzing. The technological coup was worth too much.

Unless they were using it for shadowrunning. Could the rewards of applying it subversively be greater than the killing to be made on the open market? The AI had been present in the Hidden Circle's architecture. Dodger's investigations had revealed no significant connection between Renraku and the Circle. There were the usual minor connections between some of the

druids' corporations and the megacorp, but no more than could be expected in the interconnecting world of modern business. Renraku had contracts with the British government, but Dodger had been unable to detect any unusual activity or connections there, either. Normally, he would have assumed that everything was just too well hidden. But with the AI involved, he couldn't be sure. The Hidden Circle's antics just weren't Renraku's style.

So what was the AI doing in the Circle's architecture?

His first thought had been that Renraku might be moving against the Circle, too. Such criminals might attract the attention of a civic-minded megacorp. The publicity for squashing murders and terrorists was always worth a few points on the stock exchange. But the AI hadn't done anything to the Circle's system, and Renraku operations were quiet. The fragging local Red Samurai contingent had just been withdrawn for temporary assignment on the continent. Dodger's every runner sense screamed that Renraku wasn't involved. So who was running the AI? It wasn't the renegade druids. If they had that kind of Matrix power, Dodger would be a vegetable by now. The AI was just too much Matrix muscle.

For all its power, the AI was a riddle. It had found him in the Circle's architecture. How? It had even brought him a present. Why? Could it have been following him? Again, how and why? What in all the electron heavens and hells was going on?

Dodger had begun to think the only one with the answers was the AI itself. If he met it, he could ask. That was a concept that burned while it froze. When he was jacked in and experiencing the AI in the Matrix, he had no desire to stay in its presence. No rational desire, anyway. But an irrational attraction was there. He could no longer deny it. There weren't supposed to be emotions in the Matrix. The electron world had no pheromones to clog a man's brain and force animal reactions on a rational mind. When he stood under the electron skies, in the presence of the mirror woman with the ebony clothes, something called to him in a way he had never experienced before. At least not in the Matrix. He felt very afraid when he realized that the pull was too much like what he felt in Teresa's presence.

The meat and the mind, enemies ever.

So what was going on?

He was tired and confused and hungry. Knowing he wouldn't be able to deal with any problems if the meat collapsed on him, he rose shakily from his seat and stumbled across the squat toward the refrigerator. He hoped Willie had stocked the thing before she had relocated her base of operations.

He hadn't thought that was a good idea. Sam or Hart wouldn't know where they had gone, and leaving a message with a map was just as dangerous as staying put if the bad guys tracked them down. More dangerous; in a new base they'd feel safer than they were. She'd argued that splitting their reduced forces was dangerous, and been incensed that he refused to leave. But then, she'd already been smoking over the time he spent chasing his Ghost in the Machine instead of looking for Sam.

The refrigerator door didn't rattle when he opened it. Even as bleary as he was, he knew that wasn't a hopeful sign. The vegetable bin was empty save for a browning, wilted bunch of celery. The shelves held a few soggy pasteboard cartons sagging with the weight of their contents and a trio of bottles of Kanschlager fortified ale. The detrius of their patronage of the local food merchants he understood, but Willie's abandonment of some of her booze was a surprise. He picked up one of the bottles. He squinted his weary eyes at the label, but couldn't read the fine print. How the mighty have fallen from their lofty ideals. Alcohol was another sin of the flesh that dragged the mind from the clearer realms. Still, it would taste better than what they called water around here.

A sudden clatter from the doorway showed him just how strung out he was. He dropped the bottle. It shattered at his feet, spraying shards of plastic and sticky ale over his bare feet. A glance over his shoulder wiped such petty concerns out of his foggy brain.

Two men had entered the squat. The noise had come from the one clothed in dark garments. He had slipped on the remains of Dodger's last meal and grabbed the table where the cyberdeck and Willie's radio lay. The rattle of equipment had betrayed their entrance.

The second intruder was already halfway across the room. At first, Dodger thought he was a Shidhe because of the cut and material of his clothes, but the wild beard that spilled from the shadows of the hood dispelled that thought. Emanating menace, the intruder closed the distance between them in four quick, long strides. Dodger tried to move out of the way, but his flesh, the poor abused meat, betrayed him. The norm caught Dodger easily as he tried to slip past to reach his gun.

Pain shot through Dodger's spine as he was slammed into the edge of the kitchen counter. The norm forced him into the counter, grinding the edge into Dodger's arched back. The cold muzzle of a gun forced his chin up.

"So confident that you didn't even bother changing your base of operations? Should I shoot you now or let you try to lie your way out of it again?''

Dodger was shocked to recognize the voice.

"Sam?"

Sam grinned with surprising savagery. "Surprised, aren't you? She couldn't hold me."

Sam wrenched Dodger upright and shoved him against the refrigerator. Dodger's right elbow caught the edge of the door painfully. He cried out and grabbed for it with his other hand as he struggled to stay on his feet. Sam took two steps back and leveled his weapon at Dodger's chest. The gun's muzzle seemed far too large for the pistol's size. "Sam, that's not a tranq gun." "No, Dodger. It's not. Give me a good reason not to use it on you."

"Use it? What are you talking about? What happened? We've been trying to find out what happened to you and Hart for a week. We were really worried. Who's the other guy? Where's Hart? Is she okay?"

Dodger knew he was babbling, but the words just kept pouring out. Sam's face was stony. His lack of reaction and warmth rattled Dodger almost as badly as the gun his friend was pointing at him.

"Hart's in deep drek with her friends. Excuse me, your friends."

' 'My friends? What are you talking about?''

"Dump it, Dodger! I've had enough of your lies," Sam shouted. His hand was shaking with the violence of his emotions. "Look at you! You're pathetic. What's the matter, chummer? Drinking away your sorrows? Or are you trying to get up enough courage to sell Willie into captivity, too? Why don't you just have her killed? It'd be kinder than putting her into some elf zoo. See the halfer rigger and the crazy wildman from Seattle! Amusing! Entertaining! All courtesy of Dodger and Hart Enterprises. You've conned me for the last time."

Dodger let go of his bruised elbow and drew himself to his full height. If this was going to be the end of the flesh, he wouldn't cringe. He didn't know what had set off his friend, but there really wasn't anything he could do about it. Sam was obviously confused, maybe mind-controlled, and he wasn't listening. But talk was the only weapon Dodger had.

"You're wrong, my friend. Whatever happened to you, I had no part in it." "You're a liar!" Sam raised his pistol.

The muzzle pointed directly between Dodger's eyes. Death was a finger twitch away. Sam's hand began to shake.

"Drek! I can't do this!"

Sam threw the gun across the room. His companion stretched out an arm to catch the weapon, but its trajectory took it just out of his reach. The pistol hit the wall, gouging the wallboard, and rebounded onto the mattress Dodger had been using for a bed. For the first time, Sam's companion spoke.

"It's just as well, Sam. I don't think the elf is lying.

His aura indicates that his confusion is real."

Sam turned away from both of them. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. Sam's companion stood silently watching him, an expression of concern on his face. The companion turned to look at Dodger, his eyes full of curiosity.

Dodger didn't know what to do. He was shaking himself. While he dithered, Willie's voice burst from the radio receiver.

"Twist! Is that you, Twist? What's going on?" There was a pause. "Frag it! Somebody answer me!"

Sam walked to the radio, avoiding eye contact with anyone.

"I'm here, Willie," he said shakily.

"Frag, but I'm glad you're back. Where ya been?"

"Took an involuntary vacation."

"Hell of a time to go sightseeing, but you could've come back sooner."

"Would have if I could have, Willie." Sam took a deep breath and released it. When he spoke again, his voice was steady. "My tour guide had other ideas."

"What counts is you're back. You ready to run again, chummer?"

"All cylinders."

Dodger thought it sounded likle false bravado, but

Willie obviously took it at face value.

"Good 'cause the ante's going up and you're the last magicker on-line."

"The last… what's happened?"

"Just had a drone in for a meet with Herzog. He's dead. Somebody raided his sanctum, but he put up the good fight. Made 'em pay. Took out four or five, my count on the body parts was a little iffy."

"The Circle?"

"Neg. Not unless they've got a lot broader of mind while you were gone. The hitters were all elves."

Sam turned to stare at Dodger. "Say again."

"I said the guys who took out Herzog were all elves."

"Elves," Sam repeated softly. "Talk to me,

Dodger."

Jenny's check on the power draw for the squat confirmed that either Dodger or Willie was still operating out of the apartment. There wasn't enough usage to supply both the elf's cyberdeck and the rigger's board. One of them had moved out. The broad-band receiver Hart carried didn't show any unusual broadcast activity, so she assumed it was the elf. As far as she knew, Willie didn't use booster stations to hide her location.

Hart's surveillance hadn't picked up any activity for over an hour. Jenny confirmed power draw, so that meant Dodger was decking and the others asleep. It was time to move.

She left her perch and made her way down through the building, exiting around the corner and out of sight from the runners' lair. Timing her crossing to coincide with traffic, she crossed the street screened from the apartment's window. Once on the same block, it was easy to move unseen through an adjoining tenement and up onto its roof. She leaped across the gap between the tenements and landed with satisfactory silence. Crossing the rooftops, she hesitated only a moment near the brick shack that Sam had tried to use for cover against her shots. She shook off the thoughts that threatened to upset her centering and proceeded to the cornice at a position above the flat's biggest window, where she set her bag down. In a few minutes, her gear was rigged, and she sat down to do an astral scout of the squat three floors below her; she didn't want any surprises. She got one.

The flat was astrally warded! Unable to penetrate the protection to view the interior, she returned to her body. She would have to go in blind, relying on the mundane reconnaissance she had already performed. There was no reason to delay. She shed her long coat and clipped the drop line to her harness. Satisfied that it was secure, she went over the side, walking the wall past darkened windows.

The winter air was chill, but she barely felt it. Her doubts kept her warm. Was she doing the right thing? With a swiftness born of familiarity, she squirted lubricant into each side of the window frame. She let it penetrate for two minutes, then tried to lift the sash. It moved smoothly and silently; as she had remembered, there was no lock.

With the kitchen window open, the blackout curtain was the only impediment to entrance. She folded her legs, then straightened them, pushing off from the wall. The extra force from her right leg angled her return so that she would pass through the aperture. Her feet brushed aside the curtains and as her hips went through the frame, she hit the friction clamp and released its tension. She hit the floor and tucked herself into a forward roll. The soft clack of harness buckles against the floorboards was the only sound she made. She came up into a crouch and froze, listening.

The apartment was silent save for the soft background hum of an active computer system. The soft glow from a terminal screen was the main room's only illumination. No one moved in what she could see of the room.

Hart remained in place for five minutes or more, and heard nothing else. Satisfied that she had alerted no one, she stood up and stepped forward. Her curse broke the peacefulness.

There was no one there. The computer hummed only to itself, but there was a message on the screen: It read:

"Not what you expected, is it?

"Too bad.

"There's a new twist in the game.

"Press ENTER for more."

She knew better than that. She left the way she had come in.

"A return to old haunts when the other side is on to you can be fraught with danger," Glover said pedantically. "But then, I suppose you have already learned that. The restraints are not too uncomfortable, I hope?"

The captive had only one eye, since the other had been closed by the purplish black bruise covering most of one side of his face. Still, he glared. Glover found it amusing.

"It would have been better for you had you simply kept running. You could hardly expect to succeed where your associates had failed. You are only one person and nowhere near as skilled as they were. But don't feel too impotent. Your friends did some damage, and they might have done more against us had we not already been alert for those who would sabotage our great work."

"God will see you punished," said the prisoner. "God? Whose god, my pathetic friend? Yours? In the olden days, they believed that the stronger god would overcome the weaker and set his people above all others. You can see the motif in so many stories that one must think in the days when myths were made, before the old magic lessened, that there was a factual basis for such replacement. Today, you sit defeated, and I stand victorious. Your god has forsaken you, but the Sun shines on me."

"Your pride will be your fall." "Stubborn." Glover chuckled. "One might almost think you still held hope for a rescue. Do not. The rest of your little band have gone the way of all flesh and, in doing so, have strengthened our cause. You shall join them when the appointed hour comes. Perhaps I myself shall wield the sacrificial knife that drinks your blood."

"You are deluded. Your murders bring you no power. Your path is corrupted."

"How could you know? Our rituals are steeped in a tradition that antedates your pitiful church. We have reached back to touch the old ways, the true ways of power. I have felt it." "You have felt lies, murderer." Glover backhanded the prisoner, rocking him back and almost toppling the chair to which he was bound. Blood spurted from the prisoner's nose to spatter the white cuff of Glover's shirt with incarnadine stars.

"I had thought you an educated and intelligent man, Father Rinaldi. Your fellow Sylvestrines spoke so highly of you in interrogation that I thought you might be able to see beyond your prejudices, once confronted with the truth. I see I was mistaken. Still, your soul will fuel our paean to the Sun." "Your blasphemy will be stopped." "Your faith is touching, father. Would it be shaken if you knew one of your fellow priests told us everything we needed to know about your communications with Rome? As far as your superiors know, your team has found nothing as yet. You are, however, pursuing a most diligent investigation. By the time any of the fossils in Rome suspect that they are being fed false information, the cycle of rituals will be complete and our Circle shall no longer need to be Hidden. We shall set the king on his throne, and the restored land shall be as it was."

"You're mad. Corrupted by evil."

"And you're powerless. Consumed with envy." Glover laughed loud and long. "The weak will never understand the strong. Never having tasted power, they are incapable of it. You and your weakling breathren will never know the true power the Circle has touched. Even when we reveal it, you will see only a shadow of the truth. Well, your fellows will see. You, my dear father, will be long gone."

"It shall not be. Even on earth, you are opposed." "Perhaps you refer to the meddling of shadowrunners. They had been causing us some difficulty, but their masters are too ill-organized to control their minions and insufficiently committed to maintain bothersome pressure. Their bumbling runners ran afoul of their own internal factions, and the team crumbled away, leaving only a handful of pox-ridden elves to annoy us. Stings only. Why, just last night we swatted one of the annoying insects. Their importance diminishes to insignificance as we grow in strength. When we have established the new knigdom, we will deal with the shadowmasters and they will regret opposing us."

The buzz of the telecom cut off Rinaldi's response. Glover was annoyed; he had ordered that he was not to be disturbed. He returned to his desk, intent on giving his secretary a piece of his mind, but he changed his mind when he saw which line was lit. Tapping the command to transfer the call to headset, he settled the earpiece and opened the line. The call was swift and to the point. Cutting the connection, he faced the priest.

"Someone else has taken an interest in you, Father

Rinaldi. You should feel honored."

The garden mezzanine of the Hawthornwaite Residential Tower was deserted save for three animated shadows near the banks of private elevators. Faint music from the bar in the lobby three levels below masked what few sounds the shadows made as they huddled near the control panel. One detached itself from the group and moved to stand by the brazen doors bearing the GWN graphic on the left panel.

Listening at the door, Sam could hear the elevator car approaching. If the car didn't stop, they might as well go home. If they could.

As the car sighed to a stop, Sam cocked the bolt on his Narcoject Hypnos. The rifle version of the tranquilizer gun felt bulky and obvious. But this was a raid and inconspicuousness wasn't a high priority. If the elevator disgorged security troopers, he'd probably need the extra capacity the rifle's magazine afforded. Briefly, he wondered if he might be better off using the captured LD-120 pistol that rode in the holster at his hip. No, the building's guards would just be doing their jobs. Did that deserve death? The druids and their acolytes deserved no mercy, but what of their unsuspecting minions?

Dodger, seated on the floor next to the doors, concentrated on his cyberdeck. Willie readied the elf's Sandier submachine gun and laid it near his right hand before cocking her own.

"Give me first shot," Sam said.

"You sure?"

Sam nodded.

"Wilco," Willie confirmed as she backed along the wall to give her a line at the part of the car Sam wouldn't be able to cover in the first sweep.

With a pneumatic hiss, the doors slid open to reveal an empty car.

Sam let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. With its release, tension drained from his muscles. They'd made it past the first hurdle.

He held the door while Willie trundled inside to catch the door button. Dodger jacked out and began reeling in the datacord he had patched into the elevator controls.

"Hurry up, Dodger," Willie urged. "Patience, Mistress Machinerider. If aught appears amiss after we depart this floor, the alarums will ring. 'Twould be most unfortunate if haste undid our plans at this stage."

"Just do a good job, Dodger," Sam said.

"Assuredly, Sir Twist."

Dodger finished his fussing and gave the panel a quick polish with a rag before joining the others in the car. Willie released her button and the panels hissed closed. Sam reached across to tap the bronze strip labeled OWN and start them on their journey to the ninetieth floor.

"Pray tell, Sir Twist. Where is the priest? I thought he had joined our team.''

"He had other business."

Willie snickered. "You bust him out, and the first time you need help, he's off doing errands? Some gratitude."

"His other obligations had first claim on his loyalties. If all goes well, he'll be joining us later. With help."

"But not tonight?"

"No, not tonight."

"And why should we need help tonight?" Dodger asked sarcastically. "We are but three intrepid souls invading the residence of a multinational corporation's highest officers. Since we hope to beard their local executive officer in his home, why should we be concerned with numbers? He is only a dreadfully powerful shaman and will, no doubt, have only a battalion or two of mundane guards. What have we to fear from them?"

"Dump it, Dodger." Sam didn't need the elf's sarcasm. They might not know exactly what they were getting into, but they had all studied what information they had. They all knew who the target was. The time for cold feet had been two hours ago. Dodger may not have had anything to do with Herzog's death, but he was not yet back in Sam's good graces. "You know why we're here."

" 'Twas your choice."

"You didn't have to come."

"Pray, tell. What would you have done without me?

Scaled the building?"

"We'd have managed," Sam replied. Dodger's whining was beginning to get to him. "Willie's good with electronics."

"Take it easy, Twist. Dodger's just nervous like the rest of us. I gotta admit, I don't like moving on this guy when we don't know if he's dead or alive."

"Alive. Dead," Dodger scoffed. " Tis a difference that makes no difference to this run."

"It'll make a difference if the fat man's waiting for us," Willie observed, gripping her weapon tighter.

"The villain is dead. Did not Sir Twist see Hyde White go down during the raid on the ritual?"

"But there was no body," Sam said. " 'Twas present if you accept the wendigo corpse as his. Such a hypothesis explains the more grisly aspects of the Circle's operations. 'Twould account for the sluggishness of GWN's business reactions as well."

"Jeez, Dodger. You can't still believe that," Willie said. "The druids are still doing their Bone Boy stuff. That dead wendigo ain't the answer. I think HydeWhite is still alive, but wounded. That would fit with the business problems."

"A clattering fit to the facts, Mistress. The wendigo is dead. Hyde-White is missing. Therefore, HydeWhite is dead."

"That's pretty shaky, Dodger."

Sam interrupted Willie before she could get rolling. "Whether Hyde-White is alive or dead, OWN is still functioning and serving the Circle. That's more than enough reason to hit it. Since the company's a potential target for more than the opponents of the Circle, we'll be able, with a little lucik, to hide our incursion under the guise of an ordinary shadowrun against the corporation. Besides any damage we do to GWN, we should be able to find out the truth about HydeWhite."

"And if he's alive, Twist?" Willie asked.

"We cut him out of the Circle." Dodger waited a moment before asking, "Sir Twist, are you saying we shall kill him?"

Sam kept his gaze riveted to the doors, but he could feel Dodger's eyes on him. "There are still too many druids to take them on all together. We need to chip away at them."

"You have not answered my question." The slowing of the elevator was an answer of its own.

"Get ready," Sam ordered.

As they had hoped, the guard at the station was sluggish. He had no time to do more than catch a glimpse of them from the corner of his eye before Sam cast his spell. Sam knew it was a success as a puzzled look crept over the security man's face. He had succumbed to the illusion and was seeing an empty elevator car.

The guard stood up and started around from behind his desk, muttering about technical malfunctions. Sam shot him with the Hypnos as soon as he was out from behind the desk. The guard's puzzlement slipped into bafflement as he sank to the plushly carpeted floor. He was snoring when the runners stepped over him to get |to the desk controls.

Willie ran her hands along the controls. Her stubby I fingers touched each lightly as if she could divine their function by mere contact. She nodded to herself, tongue sticking out to touch her upper lip, as her roaming hands came to rest on a row of buttons beneath a flat metallic panel. She tapped the first, and the panel clicked, its left side separating from the desk's surface. Willie flipped the panel open, revealing a hidden set of switches and a datacord receptacle.

"Rig option," she announced. "Ain't it nice when the info ya buy is right?" Her partners didn't bother to answer her question,

but she didn't seem to mind as she settled into the stillwarm chair. In thirty seconds she had jacked in and switched the security system management over to rigger control.

Sam had never understood how a rigger made the translation between body sense and the diverse components of a building's systems. Rigger security control was even more alien than the way they piloted vehicles. "Nothing to it," she had said when he proposed the raid. "It's just like a big body; ya get itches where something's happening." The concept was creepy to Sam. It lacked the purity of the Matrix or even the more understandable body-control concept of vehicle rigging. But Sam didn't have to understand or like it. It was Willie's job\a151all Sam had to do was count on her to do it right.

"What's going on in the residence?" he asked. "Quiet," she replied. "I don't think anybody's home."

' 'And no signs of recent occupation,'' Dodger added confidently.

"Wrongo, elf. Plenty of signs: dirty dishes, rumpled bed, private line call logged out less than two hours ago. But nobody's there… wait a min. There's something funny about that level." "Looped broadcast?" Sam suggested. "Neg. All eyes are live. But they're not seeing everything."

"Alternate sensors tracking something?" "Neg on that. There aren't alternate systems anywhere but on this level. I think… yeah, it's got to be. There's part of this level that isn't covered by the security system." "A black room?" Sam speculated. "Could be." Willie agreed. "Looks like you two will be doing an in-person visit after all." "Thrilling," Dodger said.

"You can handle the locks, Willie?" "Null perspiration. You want to go up by lift or stairs?"

"Stairs. More options for retreat." "Allow me," she said. Across the lobby a doorway opened. Through the arch, Sam could see stairs.

He tapped Dodger on the shoulder and started for the stairs. Sam could hear the elf grumbling under his breath as he followed. The unprofessional bitching stopped as they reached the landing below HydeWhite's residence. Guns ready, they advanced up the last flight. When Sam signaled their readiness to the stairway camera, Willie opened the door. Dodger went through low while Sam covered him. They got the drop on an empty room. When nothing reacted to their presence, Sam said softly, "You there, Willie?"

"Affirm." Her voice came from the building intercom speaker. "I see you but they won't. I dumped a copy of an all-camera scan, just in case we need to know the layout of the place for some future op, and I'm using it to run refeed on the room cameras from the five minutes before you got there. If anybody notices, it'll look like a digital overprint. Just let me know if you need more time. But try to be quick, a second blip'll start looking suspicious." "We'll do that. Now where's this blind spot?" Hyde-White's residential level was made up of a bewildering arrangement of spaces demarcated by freestanding walls and half-walls and room dividers. There were also several spaces which were completely enclosed. Willie directed them as well as she could, but it still took them five minutes to isolate the area that was in the rigger's blind spot. Dodger found the door hidden behind a tapestry.

"Sir Twist," his muffled voice called. "You must needs see what I have found."

Sam pulled aside the tapestry preparatory to entering the hidden chamber and immediately felt the tingle of magic. Warily, he leaned against the outer wall and probed with his astral senses. The room was surrounded by the rosy glow of an astral barrier. Something coiled about the top of the domed-shaped protection, but it seemed inactive. Sam sensed no threat from it. Concluding that the ward was only a protection from astral intrusion, Sam returned to his mundane senses and probed the open doorway with a tentative hand. Nothing happened, so he followed Dodger into the chamber.

The stench was the first thing he noticed. The place smelled as though something had died there. Rotting meat was Sam's first thought, but the temperature was so low that meat would have been unlikely to spoil. Sam was already chilled despite his winter clothes.

The room was only a few meters across, but it was jammed with an eclectic collection of furniture and artifacts. Dodger was poking about among the jackdaw's nest of furnishings and decorations, but Sam paid him no heed. His eyes were locked on a large oil portrait of a woman that dominated the wall opposite the doorway.

"Quite attractive for a norm," Dodger commented when he noticed Sam's fixed stare.

"Janice," was all Sam could say.

"Find anything interesting?" Dodger reached for his Sandier as soon as he recognized the voice, but she was faster. She snatched the weapon from his fingers before he could get a grip. He kicked the chair back as he stood, but she skipped clear. He spun, hoping to get inside her aim, but again she was too quick for him. He eased back against the table, forcing his muscles to relax. Elven reflexes weren't good enough to dodge bullets at this range.

Hart smiled at him. "Much more reasonable reaction."

"What do you want?"

"To talk."

"That is obvious. Else, I would not be breathing." She shrugged and lowered the muzzle of the Sandier, but Dodger felt tension in her still. Gauging the distance between them, he briefly entertained the idea of a move, before dismissing it as foolish. He'd seen her in action and knew he wasn't her match. She would be ready for anything he tried.

"Speak, then. You have captured my attention." She hesitated before saying, "I want to offer my help."

Was she serious? After what she had done to him, how could she expect Sam to let her anywhere near him? "He doesn't trust you anymore. I don't either." Her smile was sad. "You should understand how compelling previous arrangements can be, Dodger. Have you told him who had you get him involved in this mess, or that you're still passing his plans on to Estios?"

"You didn't tell him, did you?"

"Not yet, but I could."

She gripped the Sandier by its barrel, carefully lowered it to the floor, and leaned it against the wall, and stepped away from the weapon. Her actions were likely intended as a sign of her peaceful intent and meant to reduce the tension between her and Dodger. He found himself considering her motivations, and the possibilities only made him more nervous.

"We can help each other, Dodger." "If you really want to help, you'll go back where you came from. He's screwed up enough now as it is." Her brow furrowed. "What's happened? Is he hurt?"

Her concern seemed genuine, but she was a good actress. She had thoroughly fooled Sam. He considered the wisdom of telling her what was wrong with Sam, and decided that her reaction might provide a clue to the motivation behind her recent actions. If not, there was the slim chance that she might have some data that applied to the riddle of the painting.

"There was a picture of a norm woman in Hyde White's sanctum. He said it was his sister."

She grasped the situation at once. "A norm woman? I thought she had goblinized. When was the painting made?"

"The date within the artist's cartouche was mis year's."

"And the artist?"

"His identity is a mystery."

"So what have you been doing?" "He's been brooding when he hasn't been rerunning the tapes we got of Hyde-White's apartment. I've been trying to break into the OWN personnel files." "With no luck, I expect."

He was annoyed by her casual assumption of lack of progress. "I am the Dodger. It is only a matter of time."

"Isn't it always."

She reached into her satchel, and he tensed again. She offered him a tentative smile along with a raised hand. Her other hand slowly emerged from the bag, holding a slim black chip case. Dodger relaxed as she opened the case and selected an unmarked chip carrier. When she held it out, he recognized the molding as UCAS government issue.

"Try this in your deck," she said. "It's a one-shot can-opener. I've been saving it for a special occasion."

Dodger took the carrier. Unable to contain his curiosity behind the thrust and parry of shadowtalk, he asked, "Why are you doing this?"

"Let's just say I've got an inquiring mind." The lure of using her toy did not keep him from running diagnostics on it before slotting it into his deck. Slipping into the Matrix soothed him; in the electron world he had no worries. Well, only one; and it hadn't shown its mirror face in weeks. His meat was already at her mercy, but he would be safe enough until she got what she wanted.

He was amazed at the beauty and elegance with which her can-opener cut the OWN ice and slipped him into their files. The hunt was short and successful. He dumped his swag back to the deck and exited the GWN architecture. As he cleared the boundary, the can-opener evaporated. He jacked out.

Janice Verner's name was on a list of special consultants for GWN that he scrolled onto the display screen of his cyberdeck. Most of the other names meant nothing to Dodger; they had never before appeared in all his searching through portions of the Matrix associated with the members of the Hidden Circle. The one name he recognized was that of Karen Montejac. Unfortunately, Hart noticed his reaction to the name.

"You know her?" she asked.

"The, ah, lady works for a… a former client."

"So, what's the connection?"

"There isn't one."

Hart wouldn't let it go. "Guessing, or do you have evidence?''

' 'I have deferred the evaluation of connections to a higher authority who has ruled out the possibility.''

The look on Hart's face told him that she didn't like his answer. From her earlier threat, he suspected that she knew he was referring to the professor. She finally nodded in acceptance, apparently willing to concede to the professor's judgment.

"What is in the Verner file?" she asked. Dodger brought it up on the screen. It took only a little manipulation to crack the lock. The first entry was a transit pass for a corporate flight from Hong Kong to Mexico City.

"Not Yomi?" Hart asked musingly, then she smiled. "There's your answer to your problem. The date on that flight is after Sam's sister's exile. If Hyde-White recruited her, it would have been at the gulag, and she would have been whatever she had turned into by then, no longer a norm woman."

"The painting may have been done from an old picture."

Hart snorted. "Even if it were, what reason would he have for wanting it? She wouldn't, if she's like most people who go through the change. No, Sam was meant to see this painting. The fat druid's a manipulative bastard and likes playing mind games." "How do you know that?"

"Personal experience," she said bitterly. "Trust me. The portrait's got to be a fake, a ploy to throw him off stride."

Something seemed out of place to Dodger. "How would Hyde-White have known Sam was going to see it?"

Shrugging, Hart said, "Maybe he was going to plant it somewhere else."

Her explanation still seemed to be missing a chip.

"Why do it at all?"

"I don't know. But I do know that the fat man's a devious bastard and a class-A manipulator. He's the one who really started the Circle, you know. Even led the research that got them the wicker man ritual. He's the real power behind the Circle."

"As Merlin was behind Arthur," Dodger said, remembering the imposed imagery of the Circle's computer architecture.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just a literary allusion. So, what to we do about this?''

"You tell Sam, and then keep me posted. I've got other things to do."

Dodger's suspicions flared again. "More trouble to cause?''

"You betcha," she replied jauntily. "When you see him, give him these."

Hart dug a wrapped packet out of her satchel. The bundled had filled most of the bag's volume and, when the soft sides collapsed, Dodger could see the outline of a gun. He took the offered bundle. From his weight and balance, he suspected a second weapon was wrapped within its softness.

"Why should I?" he asked as she headed for the door.

She kept walking, saying over her shoulder, "He'll need them."

Sam didn't know what he expected to see, but he kept rerunning the tapes Willie had made from the trideo monitors in Hyde-White's residence. Willie watched them with him, getting twitchier with every repetition. The copy spun to an end and Sam reached for the controls to rewind the tape.

"Ain't ya seen enough?"

"One more time, Willie."

"Jeez. Ya been through through it a billion times.

Look, Twist. I'm not a forensic expert, but I am a woman. I'd say there was a woman living in that residence. Ain't that what ya want to know?"

Sam nodded abstractedly as the tape clicked over and started to play again. "But what kind of woman, Willie? A norm, or something else?"

"Do I look like a parabiologist?" Willie bounced up from the floor, grabbed a half-full bottle of Kanschlager, and downed it. "The blowups show a lot of hair scattered around, but, frag it, that don't tell us anything without chemical analysis. The fat druid and his woman could have a dog; there's enough gnawed bones in the kitchen."

"It didn't smell like a place where a dog lived."

"Well, then, a cat! Jeez, Twist, what do you want?"

"I want to know about my sister. They told me she had goblinized." Would Sato have lied about that? No, the doctor had said she was in the kawaru ward, so it had to be true. But what about later? Maybe she had died, been killed by Hyde-White and his flunkies. Maybe that was why Renraku had never let him communicate with her.

Sam didn't want to believe it. He felt sure he would know if she was dead\a151he was a fragging shaman with fragging mystical powers! If he couldn't sense the death of his own sister, his only living relative, what good were those powers? Still, he had been a reluctant shaman and had avoided a lot of what he needed to know about his gifts. He couldn't be sure that the magic would let him know if she was dead.

The portrait in Hyde-White's sanctum didn't have to be his sister. It could be a coincidence. So why didn't he believe that?

He tried to picture the painting in his mind. He wanted to remember a detail, any detail that would confirm or deny the subject's identity. All he succeeded in doing was calling up the horrid smell again.

That awful stench seemed somehow… familiar.

In his memory, it had another quality that was absent in the chill confines of the sanctum. Sam knew he had smelled the odor before; suddenly, he knew where. It had not been in the mundane world, but in the realms of the spirits where the Man of Light had worn fire like fur, and exuded that stench.

Sam remembered what the Man had said about manipulating his emotions and meddling with his memories. Had Dodger seen the same woman in that portrait?

"Hyde-White, old man. Good to see you," Glover exclaimed. "Recovered from your injury?"

"Almost."

Janice knew better. Though Hyde-White still wore bandages and limped, Dan Shiroi had long ago recovered from the injuries dealt him by a ravaging band of shadowrunners. She disliked the fat shape Dan wore. She was not skilled enough to pierce his mask and so, like his coconspirators, she could only see the obese bulk of Hyde-White even though she knew Dan's lean, furred shape hid within it. His obsession with masks no longer bothered her. She understood and embraced the necessity. She looked forward to the day when he would teach her enough to mask her own shape as effectively as he did his own, and she would be able to deceive the slimy Glover and his like.

"Your pet appears as ravishing as ever," Glover said archly.

When he thought he was unwatched, Glover regarded her with the disgust one usually reserved for things that crawled out of one's food. She suspected he knew her true form; he was a druid, after all. She also suspected that his attitude was more than the prevailing English class consciousness. The man seemed to have a pathological hatred for metahumans. But then, did that make him different from the average norm?

Glover struck her as a petty, small-minded man despite his grandiose plans for the country. She didn't like him, and wished Dan didn't find it convenient to associate with him. The other druids were nearly as bad.

Dan had told her how his Hyde-White identity was involved in the plot to replace the monarch. She had thought the plan put him too near the spotlight of publicity, but had dropped her arguments when he explained that his participation would place him in a position to influence policy regarding their metatype. The risk seemed worth it; they needed every protection they could get from the swarming norms. Even if it meant using such unsavory persons as Glover.

With her presence at these increasingly frequent dinner parties, she had come to see just how well Dan had the druids under his influence. They treated Dan like a revered elder. Alone at his home, she and Dan had laughed at them, especially Glover. The archdruid was so devoted to Hyde-White and the cause. Glover, who hated all metahumans, fawned on one regularly without ever knowing the truth. It was a rich oke.

Much better than the hoary jests exchanged by the rest of the druids once she and Dan joined them. There was the usual round of pleasantries from which she was excluded. The snubbing didn't bother her; she only came for Dan's company, and the food.

The seemingly interminable interlude in the lobby ended and Barnett, the hosting druid, opened the doors to the feast hall. The site was one of his company's conference centers, and he seemed unduly proud of it. Janice found the decorations tasteless and boring. The table, on the other hand, was set with superb style. The selection of condiments and sauces was extensive, offering a wide variety of flavorings for the main course of rare meat which dominated the setting. To either side of the golden platter with its mound of bitesized morsels, were baskets of sourdough rolls, excellent for sopping juices. Save for the guest's place, each diner's setting included a delicate ewer containing his or her favorite beverage. The guest's plate was flanked with two glass goblets, one brimming with iced water and the other gleaming with a dark wine.

Scattered among the auxiliaries to the main course were small dishes of vegetables and fruits. They added a splash of bright color to the table, but Janice no longer found such foods appetizing. Her changed metabolism was exclusively carnivorous.

The guest was already seated at the table across from the seat of honor, which was always given to Dan at these affairs. The seats for her, the druids, and their companions were ranged along the opposite side from the seated man, flanking Dan's chair on either side.

The guest didn't look up as the feasters entered. In the subdued lighting, Janice at first did not notice the extensive bruising on his face; but as she took her place, his battered visage was obvious. His dark clothes were tattered and stained, and his posture made them hang on his gaunt frame as if he had been shrunken within them. He had the air of a man resigned to an unpleasant fate.

"You could have gotten our guest a change of clothes," Dan said to Glover as he seated himself. "I did," the archdruid replied. "He refused them." "Perhaps you should have offered sackcloth and ashes," suggested Ashton.

His remark raised general laughter around the table. Janice didn't get the joke and didn't join the merriment. No one noticed.

"You are impolite, my friends," Dan chided gently.

"Pietro Rinaldi is our guest. If he wishes to attend in casual dress, I will not spurn him from my table."

Rinaldi looked up when Dan said his name and his eyes widened slightly when they rested on the speaker. He looked next at Janice and she smiled at him, hoping to set him at ease. He shivered and his gaze slid away to skim over the lavish meal set upon the table. Dan handed the great platter of meat to Glover, starting it down the side of the table away from Janice. As he awaited its return, he engaged their guest in conversation.

"I was pleased to learn you had been persuaded to stay with us, Pietro. An opportunity to interact with a person of your quality and distinction is far too rare a pleasure."

Dan waited for Rinaldi to speak, but he rudely remained silent.

"Come now, Pietro. It will not imperil your soul to talk to me."

Rinaldi glared at him before saying, "Will it not? I know what you are."

"Ah. Your gift of sight. Your fellow Sylvestrines told me that it was very strong. It must be difficult, always seeing things and never having the experience to truly understand them. You have my sympathy."

"Spare me," Rinaldi said. Janice thought the tone of his response was rude. "I understand your kind well enough."

"Do you, Pietro. I hardly think we have been rep resented fairly in the arcane libraries in which you have studied. I expect you have seen nothing but biased accounts, half-truths, and ill-informed speculations. But rather than arguing about what you think you know, I'd like to talk with you about something you know very well.

"You see, I know about you, Pietro Rinaldi. I know the facts of your career and numerous small details of your history. But more importantly, I know what kind of man you are. You are a doer, a man of action.

"As I learned of how your gift had been limited, I was saddened. To find yourself only able to watch the magic that makes the world live… such a limitation is a criminal shame. You are not a watcher, Pietro. It must gnaw at you to always see and never do." "I have accepted my lot."

"Fine words, and a noble sentiment. I'm sure your superiors approved and encouraged that attitude. However, acceptance of the inevitable is no virtue. Virtue requires sacrifice, does it not? At the very least it requires voluntary abstention. But your inability to touch the real magic is far from voluntary.''

As her own had been, Janice remembered. She had yearned for the magic, and had despaired when she was told she hadn't been blessed with the ability.

Rinaldi said, "I learned long ago not to aspire to what cannot be."

Dan shook his head. "You mean, what you were told could not be. Are you really sure that you can never have the magic flow through your hands?''

Janice had been sure until she met Dan. He had shown her the way.

"Pietro, your ignorance made things safer for them. With your access to magic limited, you were no threat to them."

Dan accepted the platter back and forked several juicy chunks onto his plate. "Knowing what I am, you know that I walk ways different from those of the bulk of humanity. Those paths have taken me to places of arcane knowledge. The power I have touched in those places transcends moral strictures, and 1 have learned how to share that power. 1 can offer you a way to transcend your own strictures. Magic, Pietro! If you accept my ways, the binding can be broken. I can lead you into the realms of power and show you the secret paths. I can give you the magic you long for. All I ask is that you embrace us and our cause." Dan held out the plate of meat. "Eat with us."

Rinaldi kept his hands on the table, but his gaze skimmed along the seated diners. "I know you better than they do. Retro me, Satanas."

Dan lowered the plate and laughed. "I am a persuasive fellow, but I have never claimed to be that particular silver-tongued devil." "But you are a devil none the less." "So I have been called, but I am not. I am a creature of the earth, Pietro. No more, no less. The earth is as much a home to me as it is to you, and we each have a place in the grand scheme. I am only attempting to offer you a better place, one in which you can exercise the power that you long for. You are obviously superior to the masses who throng the outside world. The superior are not bound by the conventions of the inferior. It has always been so. Haven't you always known that your destiny was to be a magician? "Join with us and it can be so." Rinaldi ignored the newly offered plate and said, "God is my armor. He offers all the power I need." Foolish man, Janice thought. God set the natural order on the earth and in that order, one relationship was paramount: predator and prey. If you were not one, you were the other, and the superior preyed upon the inferior. Having made the world as it was, God understood. How could Rinaldi not see that?

"Your vision of God offers you nothing but frustration and privation," Dan said. "Knowing no better, you accepted that distortion of reality. But you are no longer an uneducated child, sheltered by a limited view of creation. You have seen magics, great and small. You have seen the spirits moving through the air. How can you just be a bystander? How it must gall you to be unable to partake in the wonders!"

"It is as it must be," Rinaldi said. Janice thought his voice held less of the obstinate conviction with which he had started. Dan had said Rinaldi was an intelligent man; perhaps he was beginning to see Dan's wisdom. Janice found herself hoping that he would.

"Must be?" Dan questioned. "Very little must be to a man who has the strength to seize opportunity. You can see that if you just look around you. My companions have partaken of my table, and they are whole. They are better than whole; they are stronger than they were before they joined me. Your gift lets you see that, doesn't it?"

Rinaldi hung his head and said nothing.

"Look at them!"

Rinaldi's head snapped up at the command. He stared at the feasters with eyes as bleak as winter.

Dan sat back, smiled with satisfaction. "Yes, you can see that their auras are stronger for partaking of my feast. You can be stronger, too. Strong enough to burst the bonds that tie you and touch the face of magic. You want to feel the magic, don't you?" In a very small voice Rinaldi said, "Yes." "Then join us," Dan said, leaning forward to offer the platter for the third time. "It's not hard. Partake. Take the power of another into yourself. Make yourself strong."

Rinaldi's nostrils distended. He began breathing hard, as if he was exerting himself physically. Sweat beaded on his brow and upper lip. His eyes devoured the meat on the platter.

"Come, Pietro. You can't deny me. I'm only trying to help you fulfill your destiny."

Rinaldi locked his fingers together, elbows resting on the table and lowered his forehead to his hands. He was shaking. Dan snorted and passed the platter to Janice. She took a portion for her plate and passed it on. She felt sorry for Rinaldi. Why was it so hard for him to accept a place among them? How could he not want what Dan offered him?

The platter completed its course and the feasters began their meal. From behind the barrier of his folded hands, Rinaldi watched them. His eyes grew wilder.

At last he shouted, "Don't you all realize what you are eating?"

Silence descended on the table. Dan smiled at Janice and she smiled back. "Prey," she mouthed silently to her lover. Dan's smile grew wider. Glover cleared his throat and spoke.

"Oh, yes. We are quite aware. We partake of the ritual portion. It is necessary for the completion of the ritual. We purify the impure and return them to the holy cycle of the earth. Through us they are cleansed and, through them, we are strengthened."

"God save you! You're eating human flesh!" Rinaldi seemed verging on the edge of hysteria. "Give up your sin! Fight off the evil influence of this creature!"

"We partake of a ritual sacrament," Ashton responded calmly.

"And here I thought the Church had become more broad-minded about alternate religions," said another druid.

"We do this for the good of the land," added a third.

Rinaldi tried to get up, but Dan gestured and an invisible hand threw the priest back into his seat.

"It is impolite to leave the table before the meal is finished," Dan admonished him.

"Let me go! I reject you!"

"I am patient, Pietro," Dan said, unruffled by Rinaldi's outburst. I'll give you another chance."

"I will die first."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. I am persuasive as well as patient. I'm sure you will come around to my point of view. Soon or late, everyone gets hungry."

"I've got a line on the priest," Jenny's synthesized voice announced from the telecom.

Hart considered telling her decker to put her time into higher priority searches, but data was data and Jenny, like any good decker, collected whatever was lying around. Hart knew she should be thankful to be relying on Jenny again, instead of the more technically brilliant, but emotionally unstable, Dodger; but the stress under which she was operating was disturbing her usual crisp grasp of the situation.

"What's the word, Jenny?"

"A street runner posted an FYI on the local shadownet after seeing a magically assisted snatch outside St. Basil's in South London. Dated the op just after noon yesterday. Victim matches the priest's description."

"Could still be a thousand people."

"A thousand people don't attract the attention of other people, two of whom match descriptions with your druids,"

"You got any more details?"

"Negatively. Spotter didn't want to get involved. Beat feet soon as he twigged to the op. Said catching fireballs wasn't his style."

"Smart."

There was a pause, then Jenny said in a tentative voice, "I thought we were, too, boss."

"You got a problem, Jenny?"

"Negatively, boss," she responded quickly. "You pay the bills and I run the Matrix. What could be better? I just think this one's running a little close to overheat, and you're awful close to the fire."

"Just do your job, girl. I'll be all right."

"Hope so. Just don't want to see the boss getting hurt for no good reason."

Hart didn't like the idea of getting hurt, for any reason. Jenny's fears weren't groundless. There were too many factions scrambling around. The sooner things were settled, the better.

"Did you get the meres lined up?"

"Prepaid bond locked them down, but if they're as good as they claim, we don't have enough in the account to pay the completion fee. Logistics ate a lot of the budget."

"Don't worry, they'll take enough casualties. Feed me the rendezvous data."

The telecom beeped, signaling a datafeed on the second line. Hart split the screen and reviewed the details. They were satisfactory.

"Time to go to work, Jenny."

"I'm gone, boss." Jenny's voice faded out in simulated doppler echoes.

Word of Father Rinaldi's fate finally reached them, and it was not good. In attempting to contact the investigative team his order had sent to the British Isles, the priest had run afoul of agents of the Hidden Circle and been captured. Sam had no doubt that the priest would be one of the victims at the renegade druids' next filthy ritual.

Rinaldi's capture complicated things, and Sam didn't need any more complications. Everything was too confused as it was. He stared at the opened packet that Dodger had brought.

Weighting down the curl of the paper was a pistol holster wrapped up in its belt. The smooth black leather encased his Narcoject Lethe, the same pistol that Dodger had given him and that Hart had taken away after she shot him. The other end of the wrappings was held down by a fossil tooth. "Some kind of Late Cretaceous dinosaur,'' the paleontologist had said when Sam had taken it to the museum open house. Sam thought he had a better idea of its origin but he had been wounded and delirious that night in the badlands when he had broken it free from its sandstone entombment. Whatever it had been, it had become a power fetish for him when he drilled a hole to take a ritually knotted cord so that he could wear it around his neck. Folded neatly between the gun and the tooth was the fringed kevlar-lined leather jacket that Sally had given him after his first solo shadowrun.

What had motivated Hart to give Dodger this packet of gifts for Sam? It didn't seem to be boobytrapped; Sam had detected no residues of spells, and Willie had confirmed that no technological bugs infested the contents of the package. "He'll need it," she had told Dodger. For what? Against her? If it was meant as some sort of apology, why hadn't she contacted him herself? The unlocked for return of his goods only confused him more, raising additional worries. Time was running out.

With Rinaldi needing to be rescued, the runners had to split their already pitifully weak forces. It couldn't be helped. If their attack against Hyde-White went off before they rescued the Circle's captives, there was too great a chance that the captives would be killed out of hand. If they made their rescue attempt before the spoiling attack, the Circle would be alerted that Sam's team was back in action. That surprise element was their only advantage, and a pair of simultaneous operations was the only way to use that advantage. It was also a good way for the runners to be defeated in detail.

They were so pitifully undermanned for what they had to do. Herzog was dead, and Willie's street contacts had told her that the shaman's death had effectively cut off any chance of local help. The word on the street was that the run was suicide. Dodger was still trying to contact some out-of-town friends, but Sam didn't have much hope that they would be able to stand up to the druids. He had detailed them, should they show, to helping Dodger go after Rinaldi. With the distraction Sam's attack would provide, Dodger's group shouldn't face organized opposition. At least they had been able to make connections through Cog to outfit Willie for the raid.

The plan was weak and Sam knew it. But they'd make the run. The split weakened the effort, perhaps fatally; but Sam couldn't abandon Rinaldi, and he couldn't see a way to stagger the operations. It was all at once or not at all.

He tossed his head back and closed his eyes, using the exercises Herzog had shown him to reduce the tension. When he felt his neck muscles relax a little, he sighed and brought his head upright again. Beyond Hart's engimatic gift the telecom screen glowed with a frozen image. The screen showed a hardcover book lying on a rug, half covered by a sheet. Due to the forced image enlargement, the image wasn't sharp, but it was clear enough for Sam to recognize it. While Dodger's electronic delvings seemed to contradict Sam's certainty that the woman who was residing in Hyde-White's residence was his sister, the book argued otherwise. And, to Sam, the book won the argument and spurred his haste.

Only the author's name and half of the title were visible, but Sam knew the book, anyway. It was R. Norman Carter's Queen of Sorceries. The original spine of the cover was gone, replaced by a strip of plastiboard taped down to protect the binding. Sam remembered his father standing behind his shoulder monitoring him as he carefully lettered the name of the book onto that now-scuffed piece of board. He could hear Janice crying in the other room and the soft, comforting tones of his mother as she tried to soothe her frantic daughter. Sam had still been mad and unrepentant about teasing his sister about her fondness for the story. His father had said it had been cruel to tease Janice, but Sam hadn't understood at the time. He had thought that his father would approve of his attitude. After all, the book glorified magic. Sam had thought he was rescuing Janice from the perils of magic.

What he hadn't known when he was nine. Even with its shoddy repair, or perhaps because of it, the book had remained one of Janice's childhood treasures. Like their father, she had always been sentimental about books. Sam didn't understand the passion she felt for the physical object, but he knew that she would have used her limited weight allowance to take her favorites with her to Yorni.

Now that book sat in Hyde-White's residence, and Sam could not believe that it belonged to anyone other than his sister. Somehow, Hyde-White had rescued her from Yomi and seduced her. For the first, Sam had to be grateful; the druid had done something Sam had been unable to do. But, for the second, the man had only earned Sam's enmity. Janice had obviously exchanged one form of bondage for another, and she probably was more than grateful for the attention the fat druid gave her. Her goblinized form would not be beautiful.

Sam could not leave his sister living a lie. He was all the family she had left, and he would have sought her freedom even if Hyde-White had been no more than a wealthy and jaded corporate with an exotic taste in bedmates. The druid's evil taint made Janice's rescue and Hyde-White's elimination imperative.

Dodger knew that the electronic contact would have been safer. Not that he was worried about physical safety; he had chosen the meeting site carefully. Though elves were uncommon throughout the plex, their presence in this dive of a pub was less remarkable; London's metahumans showed remarkably more tolerance for each other than the norms did for any of the metatypes.

Even though a Matrix connection would have given him less opportunity to screw up, he wanted an inperson meet. It wasn't because he wanted to deal with Estios face to face\a151that was a pain on which he would gladly pass. He felt a need to see Teresa again.

He was on this third V-juice when Estios and Teresa entered the pub and took a booth in the back. From his shadowed position at the bar, he waited, watching to see if they had a tail. Satisfied that there were no obvious followers, he flipped a one-band credstick to the ork behind the bar and joined them.

Teresa looked tired and worn down, but she had a smile for him. Beneath the layer of exhaustion, Estios's expression was even more sour than usual. The hand he tapped nervously on the table was wrapped in surgical tape. The exposed flesh at the base of his fingers looked raw.

"Let's get to it, alley runner. I don't like being out in the open like this."

Dodger gave him a smile as wide and honest as that of a megacorp's public relations director. "Indeed, I think 'tis a lovely evening as well, and your inquiries into my health are sincerely appreciated."

"In your pointy ear, smart-ass. We lost Chatterjee the other night."

Dodger swallowed his levity. He hadn't particularly liked or disliked the Indian elf, but he had respected him as a competent runner. "I know. I'm sorry."

"That don't change anything. He's still dead. If we'd had some more muscle on the floor, he might not be."

Dodger's retort was cut off by Teresa.

"There's no need to lay guilt on Dodger. You went ahead with the raid after you knew he couldn't make it."

"Don't start," Estios snapped.

Teresa sat back. Estios's heated reaction seemed to assure her that her point had been made.

"Chatterjee knew the risks, alley runner," Estios said directly to Dodger, as if he needed to explain his own responsibility in the other elf's death. "We're not playing games here. But his death costs the team, and I don't plan on losing anybody just to have a chat with you. Make your point quickly, or we're gone."

"Very well. We've gotten reliable information on the itinerary of one of the Circle. There will be an opportunity for a strike."

"I assume your presence here means that Verner isn't going after him."

"Her. It's Wallace."

"Whatever," Estios said, dismissing the correction with an irritated wave of his injured hand. "You had reported that his strategy was to whittle them down."

Dodger tried to sound properly offended by Estios's implication. "I have reported all with scrupulous accuracy. Sir Twist wants to wait for a shot at bigger fish."

"But, Dodger, why pass this information on to us? If we hit Wallace, it'll stir the Circle up," Teresa observed. "That would seem to complicate Verner's plans."

"A successful raid will also weaken the Circle." He turned to Estios. "I think even you can see that an opportunity to weaken them will be to all our benefits."

"There will be just the one?" Estios asked, still suspicious. "They been hanging pretty close since we iced Carstairs."

"For this occasion, the Circle will be separated. One druid and a minimum amount of muscle is all there will be. The Circle continues to expand their shadow contacts, and there is to be a meet with an important runner. Since the site is within Wallace's turf, the politics of the situation demand a show of trust. Security will be light." "You've got plans for the meet site?" "Of course." Dodger slid a chip case across the table. "Times and routes as well."

"And you're willing to take Chatterjee's place on this hit?"

Dodger hesitated. "I'll ride Matrix cover." "Some brave fellow, eh, Teresa? Can't get shot or flamed in the Matrix."

"There are dangers enough in the Matrix," she said. Dodger wondered if she was worried about him. Estios made his own feelings clear by saying, "Not when we all know the Circle hasn't got a decker in his league."

"Is that a backhanded compliment, Estios?" Dodger said in mock surprise.

Estios glowered at him and stood. He half-dragged Teresa from the booth. "If you do the job, alley runner. We'll take out the druid."

The abrupt end of the meeting spoiled Dodger's hopes of talking with Teresa. His pique roused him to take a jab at the departing Estios. "What's the matter, Mister Competence. Don't you trust me?"

Wind whistled past the cockpit. The rush of air almost drowned out the moan and hum of the taut fibercables connecting the Fledermaus to its untenanted twins. The cables slaved the autopilots of the other craft, forcing them to duplicate Sam's maneuvers. The dogbrains were left just enough latitude to compensate for slight differences in the air flow.

In the distance, the triple towers of the Brighton

Centrum stood like spires of light against the night. Below and beyond them, the lights of the district dotted the landscape like a mass migration of hopped-up fireflies.

Somewhere down there various radars would be running, watching the skies. The cables ensured there would be no transmissions to unmask them, while the foamed exteriors and composite construction materials masked the metallic contents of the craft. To any vigilant watcher, the vee formation of Fledermaus should look like no more than a small flock of night-flying seabirds.

Sam hoped that was true. Cog had assured him of it, but Cog was safely on the ground. Sam turned the nose of his craft toward the land, riding the predawn seabreeze. Behind him, the other two ultralights turned in his wake like obedient dogs.

Hart tongued the button on the boom mike of her headset, silently acknowledging Jenny's signal. A glance over the edge of the roof showed her the two iiicles carrying the meres moving into pre-assault sitions on the plaza between the towers. It was alst time.

Jenny had managed a reasonable crop, given the constraints of time, and they were every bit as cocky jfas the decker had said. But then most of their breed I were that way; they didn't have enough brains to be otherwise. Still, they were well equipped with untraceable equipment, which she had checked herself at the briefing. More importantly, they were hopped up and ready to go on what they thought was a retaliatory property smash.

Hart had arranged for the bloodballs that they had demanded in their contract. The combat drug would raise their pain thresholds and boost their adrenal functions, making them more effective physically while cutting down on reasoning functions. Just the thing for a shoot-and-scoot where no tactical subtlety was needed. She had sternly admonished them to take only one apiece, but she knew most of them would pop a "few more. In fact, she was counting on it, and had made sure the drug was above average purity. A mere

I who succumbed to its false promise of invincibility probably wouldn't last the fight, but until then he'd be worth two or three straight shooters.

They'd need the edge; she hadn't told them about

I the magic they would be facing.

Hart laid the Conner grapple gun on the parapet and fused the sight to check the opposite roof. It was still clear. She wished she could see inside, but she didn't dare send Aleph or make an astral check herself. Surprise was vital.

She tried to relax as she waited for Jenny's go signal.

"Two doors down on the left." Dodger watched Estios and Teresa move down the corridor. She'd cover while the black-haired elf moved forward. Then, he'd hold until she joined him. They were careful and quiet. If Dodger hadn't been monitoring the hall camera, he would not have known they were there; the sound pickups didn't register their presence due to Estios's silence spell.

The pair reached the designated door. As Teresa crossed in front to take a position on the side of the frame opposite Estios, Dodger switched cameras and checked the room to satisfy himself that all was well.

"All clear," he sent on the tight band. "Bonding charge is off. Only the panel lock left.''

Estios nodded once to Teresa. He barely waited for her to signal her own readiness before stepping away from the wall. He faced the door and kicked. A portion of the frame tore free. Estios used the recoil of his kick to drop back in a crouch. Teresa cut through the door and rolled to the left as Estios aimed into the room, ready to take out any threat.

As Dodger had known all along, there was none.

A dazed Pietro Rinaldi awoke with a start. He blinked sunken eyes into at the gun-wielding elves facing him. Like any intelligent person, he made no extraneous movements.

Estios released he left-hand grip of his Steyr and slammed a fist onto the floor. Furiously, he shouted into his microphone. "What kind of drek you pulling here, alley runner!"

"Please, noble rescuer. Lower your voice. I think you're disturbing the good father. As well as possibly alerting ATT-Multifax's sluggish but still present security forces.

"Father? This guy's amp; priest?"

Dodger was inordinantly pleased with himself. Seeing Estios lose his cool was so gratifying. "Now, now.

Don't let your prejudices show. It's bad for public relations. Times are difficult and 'the enemy of my enemy' and all that. The good father opposes our mutual foe and is their prisoner." "That's his problem."

"You are being short-sighted, Ice Eyes," Dodger chided. "This gentleman will have information we can use."

Estios began to bristle, working himself up for a blistering retort, but Teresa touched him on the arm. "Dodger's right," she said softly. Her words made Estios flinch, but at least he stopped sputtering. "Besides, since he has seen us, we can't leave him for them."

"And leave you should. I've got activity on the motion detectors in the cross-corridor at junction three." "Frag it!" Estios exclaimed. "I don't like being used, alley runner. I'll get you for this."

Despite his comment, he helped Teresa get Rinaldi to his feet. An elf on either side, the priest was able to shuffle fairly quickly down the passageway.

Dodger guided them through the building, steering them past guard stations and roving patrols. His best information said that the staff of ATT-Multifax weren't part of the Circle's conspiracy, but their building security was still charged with apprehending intruders. Two elves escorting an emaciated priest would definitely attract their attention.

Once the elves and the priest were in the elevator and on their way to the roof, Dodger decided to switch back to the level where Rinaldi had been held. It wouldn't do to have a hue and cry go up. He switched to the zone in time to see a group of four people moving toward the now-vacant holding area. "Drek! It really is Wallace." "What did you say, alley runner?" Estios's query made him realize he had broadcast his surprise.

"Nothing," he responded quickly. "Just get in the veetole and go."

Estios made some kind of response, but Dodger was too busy studying the druid's party through the security camera. He couldn't see any transmitters, which was good; he would have a chance to slow them down. He started isolating the floor by activating all the telecommunications circuits for the zone. As the druid's party discovered their prisoner was gone, he was unleashing an expert program that would flit about the system causing mischief. Until someone isolated the bug, it would look as though a bush league hacker had broken through the building's ice and was flexing his muscles by messing with the telecommunications lines. By then, Dodger would be long gone. He hoped.

As he expected, the first move of Wallace and her goons was to use a telecom to alert the rest of the Circle. While they struggled with the phones, Dodger continued his guerrilla tactics. His ground team had exited onto the roof, so he shut down the elevators. He tensely waited for the veetole to lift before initiating the next sequence.

Finally frustrated with the telecoms, Wallace led her goons toward the elevators. He had only seconds before they decided to use the stairs. One by one, he cut off the security cameras in the sub-basement, starting with the one commanding a view of the elevator lobby. He was rewarded when the ATT-Multifax security triggered the building's intruder alarm. The alert status let him tweak the response and initiate the magnetic locking of the stairwell doors, to completely trap Wallace and her flunkies on a level about to be assaulted by security teams. As a parting shot, he programmed the sub-basement's sprinkler system to function in random bursts and set off the fire alarms throughout the basement levels. The noise and discomfort, would go a long way toward distracting Wallace from using magic to solve her dilemma.

He wanted to stay and watch the fun, but there wouldn't be much for him to see with the cameras out. Besides, he had places to be. He sent the go signal on ahead and slipped out of the ATT-Multifax system as stealthily as he had crept in.

Glover watched the lights of the departing helicopter disappear into the distance. The craft was carrying Ashton to investigate the trouble at the ATT-Multifax complex. There had been no word from Wallace and something seemed to be amiss on the lower level where Glover had arranged for the storage of Hyde-White's prize captive. The disturbance might have nothing to do with the captive priest; there were enough targets throughout the complex to attract shadowrunners. The Circle had taken care of the rest of the priest's team and were still successfully blocking the Vatican's inquiries. It seemed unlikely that a second team would have been dispatched this soon, and the priest hadn't been in the country long enough to ally himself with other parties. Still, with Wallace out of touch, Glover didn't want to take any chances. If there was a threat to their interests, Ashton's magical muscle and his overly enhanced bodyguards would handle it.

But until Wallace and Ashton returned, the Hawthornwaite Tower's magical defenses were weakened.

With Carstairs' loss to the shadowrunners, the Circle had lost its best situated connection in the local government. The protection afforded their operations hadn't totally disappeared, but it had been reduced, forcing them to regroup. They had been using Carstairs' residence as their chief base of operations, and his death mandated that they seek a new location. Nearby living quarters for all members was desirable for mutual support, and easy access to the lower classes a vital necessity for the continuance of the ritual cycle. Plausible mundane world connections were needed, for the Circle was obliged to remain hidden until the power ritual cycle was completed.

Brighton Centrum had seemed the perfect choice. Sir Winston Neville owned the land on which the Centrum was built, and besides being the leaseholder, he was a major stockholder in the holding corporation which administered the complex. The former archdruid's public connections with Gordon made it easy cover his transfer to the Complex beneath the guise of social affairs. Some of the Circle needed no special arrangements to move their operations to the Centrum. Hyde-White's GWN Corporation already maintained residential floors in the Hawthornwaite Tower, as did Ashton's Miltech Research. ATT had residences in all three towers, and it had been simple for Glover to invoke executive privilege to take a residence in the tower. Bringing Barnett's General Services in to replace the security corporation had only left Wallace without a business reason to be there, and she was rich enough to afford one of the luxury flats. Thus had the Circle gathered under one roof, with no one the wiser.

A buzz from the telecom interrupted Glover's chain of thought. Barnett answered it, as was appropriate: the call tone had indicated the building security line. There was a hushed conversation, most of which Glover didn't hear clearly, but he had caught enough to be unsurprised when Barnett said, "I say, Glover. Security seems to be having a spot of trouble on the plaza level."

"Why should it concern us?"

"Well, really, I am not sure that it does." Barnett stroked his mustache in a nervous gesture that Glover found irritating. "We've been having a rash of alarms throughout the complex tonight. Most of them have been false, but this is most definitely not. Sec desk is reporting ten or more heavily armed intruders wreaking havoc on the lobby and mezzanine levels."

"Have they attempted to force entry into the Tower proper?"

Barnett shook his head. "Not as yet. Their violence is without pattern, and individuals are reported to be evidencing berserker fury, which has led Sec Desk to suggest that we are dealing with a flashmob outbreak. Personally, I find the scale of this assault disturbing." Glover was annoyed by the whining tone in Barnett's voice. "Then perhaps you had best attend to it personally."

"But the Circle's anonymity…" "Will be safe," Glover finished for him. "You are a licensed druid and no one think twice if you defend your residence, especially in aiding a security corporation which you own." "Good point."

Barnett demonstrated his concern by leaving the apartment posthaste. Glover returned his attention to the skyline. Ashton's helicopter had long since vanished. After a moment, Glover felt a presence at his back. Refocussing his gaze, he saw Sir Winston Neville's gaunt face reflected in the transparex.

"Now shall we tell Hyde-White, archdruid?" Neville asked petulantly. Glover frowned.

Archdruid indeed. The title he had coveted for so long had a hollow ring these days. While Glover wore the title, the members of the Circle always seemed to look to Hyde-White for direction. Without a struggle, the fat old man had leeched the leadership role and prestige from Glover. How had Hyde-White managed it without Glover noticing? He never missed a power shift in ATT and had always moved with the flow to increase his own influence. So, what had happened within the Circle? Without the fat old man actually present, Glover was still master of the others, so Glover was not totally without influence. Hyde-White was foolish in allowing Glover to garner the lion's share of the power their rituals raised; one day that shortsightedness would turn around and bite him. Glover would not stay first in the Circle in name only. He may have missed the opening pitch, but the wickets weren't down yet.

"Archdruid?" Neville prompted.

Glover shook himself free of his brooding and turned to his questioner. Neville stepped back, apparently startled by something he saw in Glover's face.

"I just thought that," Neville began. "I mean\a151if there is a significant danger, he should know.''

' 'And show weakness by running to him over some petty problem that most likely has nothing to do with the Circle? You don't know him half as well as I do, Sir Winston. You would only earn his scorn."

"And if it does concern tie Circle?"

"Then we shall resolve it and present him with the evidence of our efficiency. We captured the priest without his involvement, as you recall. We shall show him that the Circle is no longer weak."

And I will have shown that I no longer need his strength.

Sam could see some kind of commotion at the base of Hawthornwaite Tower. Flashes of light from heavy weapons fire and magical blasts lit the sky with the sudden violence of summer lightning. The arcane bolts were coming from inside the building, which most likely meant that one or more of the druids was involved. The Centrum's security company had no onstaff magical talent, relying on quick response from the municipal police forces. Sam was pleased. The istraction would only make his job easier, perhaps changing the odds of success from utterly impossible to only mostly impossible.

He banked the Fledermaus, sending it in a wide curve around the western tower. Locking the maneuver into the autopilot, he relaxed and sent himself down into trance to free his astral body. Any warning his reconnaissance might give now would be minimal. He ghosted through the target floor and found nothing alive. The thing coiled on the sanctum's arcane dome hissed at him, but did nothing to impede him. As he passed through an area set aside as an office, a communications device buzzed, demanding attention. An immediate response cut off its strident complaint. There had been a telecom in the sanctuary; HydeWhite must have answered the call from there.

He rejoined his body as the Fledermaus finished its turn. Sam called up an overlay graphic to the headsup display and confirmed the target floor. Dipping the nose of the craft, he headed in.

One hundred meters from the tower he switched on the auxiliary motors, giving the three craft the extra power they'd need to deal with the updrafts around the building. His screech transmission to Willie was answered at once. Sam blew the armament covers, sending fragments of radar-absorbent panels fluttering toward the ground, then cut the trailing craft free. They'd be under Willie's control for the final approach; there was no longer any need to maintain comm silence.

"Fifty meters, Willie."

"Affirm."

"Launch on three."

"Wilco."

"One. Two. Three"

The Fledermaus bucked as it launched the single air-to-surface missile slung under its belly. Flashes of fire lit the cockpit from either side as the remotely piloted craft launched their missiles simultaneously.

The floor-to-ceiling transparex windows of the target floor dissolved into millions of fragments under the hammer blows of the triple explosion. Sam fought the controls as the backblast washed over the Fledermaus. Somehow he managed the keep on the flight path. An updraft caught the craft just as its nose reached where the windows had been. The tail drifted forward and one wing dipped. Dipped and caught against the building. The 'Maus slewed around, flopping hard on its belly. The light craft bounced, then came down again on its nose, balancing precariously. Sam, hanging in the safety harness, saw one of the other craft nose up as it crossed their newly made threshold and kiss the ceiling inside the residence. The collision canceled its momentum. The Fledermaus's tail was still hanging outside. With a grinding roar, the craft slid backwards and out into space again. Sam could picture it tumbling toward the plaza.

Thank you, Lord. That could have been me.

His own craft rocked backwards, its precarious balance disturbed by the rush of air chasing the plummeting Fledermaus. Sam's teeth slammed together as his aircraft crashed to rest in a horizontal attitude. Half-dazed, he flicked the harness's quick release with one hand and with the other triggered the explosive charges that blew the canopy open.

He crawled shakily from the wreckage of his Fledermaus, eyes flying across the area in search of any opposition. Finding no immediate threats, he checked the status of the third craft. The other 'Maus had made a perfect landing and was discharging its cargo. A dozen rigger drones rolled down the extended ramp.

Each drone ran on four fat, deeply treaded tires and looked remarkably like a child's radio-controlled toy. But no child had ever had such a toy. The drones were armored with ceramic composite plates and armed with fully automatic pistols mounted in extendable turrets. Each was equipped with a dog-brain that allowed it limited tactical responses when the rigger wasn't directly controlling it. The expert system wasn't a great shot or a canny fighter, but the drones would make good pillboxes capable of suppressive fire. Their small size made them difficult targets.

Once off the ramp, each drone turned in a different direction. Most were headed for the entrances to the residence level; their job was to limit reinforcements for Hyde-White. Some stolidly climbed up and across obstructions, proceeding in direct lines to their stations. Others whizzed around debris, taking corners as if they were driven by tiny, demented road rally drivers. Sam thought he knew which ones Willie was running. Within thirty seconds, only three remained in sight, and they had taken up station in a triangle with Sam at the center. Their turrets swiveled to allow gun and camera sight to cover a circular field of fire.

Smoke from the missile explosions filled the air, cutting visibility. Sam crouched, trying to keep his head below the smoke. He had to move cautiously; there were plenty of places to hide in the warren of living spaces that made up the residence level and no guarantee that Hyde-White was still in the sanctum.

Sam drew the Lethe. If by some chance Janice had been present in the sanctum and was now roaming the floor, he didn't want to shoot and kill her. Once he had a better idea where the opposition was, there would be time to shift to the heavy Ares Predator filling the holster on his left hip.

The stalk through the apartment was slow, lengthened by Sam's caution. The metroplex's night sounds were distant. They faded from Sam's awareness. Only what was near at hand mattered. He stepped carefully, trying to move silently. He listened for the slightest sound. The drones escorting him hummed almost inaudibly.

"Bogey. North Quarter," Willie announced suddenly in his ear reciever causing him to jump. "Tally ho!"

A short burst of weapons fire ruptured the silence, followed almost immediately by a howl of pain. More gunfire followed, and the sound of a heavy body crashing into things, but there were no more vocalizations. There was a crack like thunder and a flare of light washed the ceiling in the north quadrant.

"Drek. Oh drek!" Willie wailed in his ear.

Sam's escort drones swiveled their turrets and surged forward. As the last one careened out of sight around a corner, more gunfire erupted.

Sam arrived at a waist-high partition and ducked behind it. Cautiously raising his head, he got a glimpse of the battle. The drones were racing about, dodging beneath and behind blood-spattered furniture while taking pot shots at Hyde-White, who was dodging with surprising agility. He too was using the residence's furnishings as cover while he sought a clear shot at the whizzing drones. The fat druid looked uninjured, and his right hand glowed with some kind of spell held in readiness to cast.

Before Sam could decide on a course of action, Hyde-White spun and faced a drone that had backed itself into a corner. Disdaining to use his prepared spell, the fat druid reached out with a stubby-fingered hand and grabbed. With a casual flip he smashed it into the opposite wall. The drone split open on impact, scattering innards like shrapnel. With a sizzling pop, it tumbled from the drone-shaped dent in the wall and landed sparking on a couch. The fabric began to smoulder.

Sam was startled by the druid's display of strength. Belying their toylike appearance, the drones weighed almost twenty kilograms apiece. They were not easy to toss around, and the druid had thrown one with sufficient strength to crack it open.

Sam's stomach flipflopped. The last time he had seen a man display such strength, the "man" had not been a man at all, but a dragon concealed within a shapeshifting spell. Allowing Willie's drones to carry the fight, he slipped into astral perception.

In his altered perspective, the attacking drones begame blurs of murderous intent, their clean-lined mechanical appearance replaced by a fuzzy presence of intent and purpose. As machines the drones were not truly present on the astral planes. But Hyde-White, a living being, remained clear in Sam's eyes. The fat druid glowed with raw power. It was a dazzling aura, but in its tone and strength unlike anything Sam had seen before in a human.

One of the drones must have caught the druid cleanly with a burst for he suddenly staggered backwards. A smaller man might have been dropped by the impact of the bullets, but the massive Hyde-White only reeled. Sam expected to see the man's torso splattered all over his fancy wall hangings, and the live glow of his astral spirit dimmed and dying. What he did see frightened him badly. Hyde-White's astral glow remained steady and strong. The image Sam saw looked like a double exposure he had once seen in an old photograph collection. There were two Hyde-Whites occupying the same space, the sharply defined astral image and the increasingly tattered flesh form. Sam saw muscles tear, bones shatter, and blood burst forth from the flesh form to stain the room incarnadine. But the druid did not fall. Torn skin crawled and flayed muscles writhed as though imbued with lives of their own. Splintered bones swayed together to disappear under closing wounds. New flesh spread across gaps where chunks of muscle had been torn away. Once the process began, Hyde-White regenerated the wounds caused by the drone's gunfire as soon as they were made.

Despite the fat druid's appearance, Sam could no longer believe the fat druid was human. Whatever Hyde-White was, he was invulnerable to physical damage. Sam's throat tightened with fear.

The explosion on the side of the tower was the cue for which Hart had waited. She settled the butt of the Conner firmly against her shoulder and sighted in. Fifteen pounds of pressure on the trigger ignited the propellant. The grapple gun kicked into her shoulder as it sent its alloy missile two hundred meters across the gap between the towers.

The missile struck cleanly and buried its head in the concrete wall. Moving quickly, she attached the carry line to the tension wire and to the takeup reel. She hit the go button and rechecked her gear as the winch reeled in the thin line and dragged the heavier weight-carrying wire through the pulley on the attached grapnel and back to itself. When the loadbearing wire returned, she attached it to the anchored winch. She slipped the wheels of the pulley slide between the now-parallel strands of wire, snapped the cover down tight, and attached the safety wire. Reversing the winch, she tightened the line and tested the grapnel's grip. It stayed firm at four times her weight, so she slacked the tension back.

The gunfire from within the residential level, though nearer, was barely louder than the increasingly sporadic noise from the plaza. There was no time left to waste. She sat on the coping and got a good grip on the handle bar of the pulley slide. She pushed off with her feet and started herself on the slide down to the Hawthornwaite Tower.

Glover felt the tremor in the building. He didn't know what it meant, but he felt sure that it wasn't a result of the ruckus at plaza level. The source of the vibration was somewhere above the level he was on.

"What was that?" Neville asked fearfully.

Glover didn't bother to look at the old fool.

"We must tell Hyde-White."

He may be dead already, Glover thought. He found himself wondering if that would be a bad thing, and after a surprisingly short moment of indecision, decided that it would. The fat old man was still necessary if they were to achieve their goal of restoring the land.

Barnett's office did not offer the full range of surveillance monitors available to the security desk in the main operations center, but the telecom controls allowed an operator to route input through the telecom itself or one of the two wall screens. Glover took advantage of the access afforded to Barnett's station and demanded data on the status of the GWN floors. The computer showed no contact with the security systems on those floors. The condition was flagged with an immediate response request that had gone unanswered, since the building security forces were engaged in the battle on the lower levels.

Clearly, the Circle was under attack. The apparently coincidental actions were obviously planned, designed to separate the members of the Circle. It had been cleverly staged. Glover suspected the enemy's goal was to isolate the members of the Circle and eliminate them individually. It was a clever strategy, but one he would not allow to succeed.

So far, the only direct thrust against a member of the Circle was the assault on Hyde-White's residence. That would be the enemy's major thrust, barring more attacks to come. Whatever the case, the Circle needed to combine their strength as much as possible.

As he reached his decision, the office door slid open to admit a disheveled Gordon. His face was fixed in an angry frown as he swept the room with his gaze. The narrowed eyes lighted on Glover and he strutted up to the archdruid.

"What the devil is going on, Glover? I was enjoying a nice quiet evening preparing myself for the next ritual and then all bloody hell starts breaking loose. First, Barnett stops by my flat and informs me that there is some kind of row going on downstairs. Then, there's a bloody great explosion that shakes the whole building. Is it the shadowrunners again? You must have gotten some of them, since one of their bloody aircraft went tumbling past my window." Gordon stopped suddenly in the midst of his tirade. "Where is he? Is he all right?"

Glover didn't need to ask to know that Gordon wanted to know what, if anything, had happened to Hyde-White. Bel's blistering face! Did no one accord Glover his pride of place as archdruid? Glover stifled the thought. The land came before any questions of dominance, and the needs of the land would not be met if the enemy succeeded. The foremost need was to end the threat to the Circle.

"He is in his residence, Your Highness. Neville and

I were just on our way there.''

Gordon didn't see the surprised look on Neville's face, and his own words drowned out those of the old druid.

"Then I'm going with you. I must know if he has been hurt. Those shadowrunners almost killed him before. If he's alone, he'll need our help."

Glover shook his head as he stepped past Gordon and grabbed Neville by the shoulder. He hustled the former archdruid toward the door, saying over his shoulder, "There's no need for you to go, Your Highness. Sir Winston and I will deal with any problem that might have arisen."

He might as well have saved his breath. Gordon fell in behind them, and his bodyguards behind him. The parade lasted all the way to the lobby, where Glover stopped in front of the GWN shaft. Gordon's constant babbling about Hyde-White's safety almost made Glover fumble the security code that called a car.

Glover shoved Neville into the car as soon as the doors hissed open. He turned to insist that Gordon remain behind, but before he could speak the man brushed past him and entered the car. Realizing that argument was useless and time was passing, Glover entered the car himself. The two bodyguards crowded in behind him. Glover tapped in the code for HydeWhite's floor. The doors slid shut and the car began to rise.

After only a few seconds, the car lurched to a stop.

"Power's still on," observed one of the guards.

"Must be a security check."

"Are you sure you entered the right code, archdruid?"

Neville's tone was unusually catty for the increasingly timid former archdruid.

"It was correct," Glover replied. He didn't bother to hide his annoyance.

"Well, call security and get this elevator moving again," Gordon ordered. "Hurry! He needs us."

Glover snapped open the panel covering the emergency comm unit with more than the necessary force. The cover rebounded from the wall to rap him sharply. He cursed as the edge jarred his hand with pain.

" Tis evocative, but hardly likely," a voice commented from the speaker. The comm screen glowed to life with the image of a white-haired, male elf. "Good evening, archdruid, Your Corrupt Highness. Ah, Sir Winston, I'm very glad you're here as well." "Who are you?" Gordon asked belligerently. Sudden suspicion bored in on Glover. ' 'What do you want?"

"Much cooler, archdruid. As to what I want, shall we just say that I hope you're as cool in hell. Going down."

The elevator began to plummet. The initial lurch of car threw its occupants off balance. As Glover recovered he could see fear etched in the faces of his companions. Even Gordon's bodyguards were afraid\a151their reinforced bones would not save them from a forty-story plummet.

"No need to bother with the emergency brake," the elf said jauntily. "It's disconnected."

One of the bodyguards slammed the button with his fist anyway. As predicted, there was no response. The guard slammed it again and again, denting the surrounding panel with the force of his blows. "Do something, Glover! Save us!" Gordon's voice was shrill with panic. Glover blocked it out and concentrated. Raising his personal protection spell only took the archdruid a moment\a151a moment in which the elevator car gathered speed in its downward rush. Glover knew that maintaining the protective spell would make other magic difficult, but he was sure he would need the safeguard.

Glover raised his arms above his head and spread them. He focused his energy and blew the roof from the elevator car. Fluorescent panels, structural members, and supporting cable volatilized. The sound of the car's downward passage no longer muffled, a rushing sound filled the car.

Gordon grabbed Glover's shoulder, dragging down one arm. "What in heaven's name are you doing?" "I'm leaving. The land needs me." "What about me? The land needs me, too!" "There are others of royal blood." Glover struck the grasping hand away and pressed his palms together at chest level, fingers pointing out. He rotated his wrists until his fingers pointed up, and the elevator car dropped away. He remained floating in the shaft.

The decker's frustrated cursing joined the screams of Gordon, the howls of the bodyguards, and the desparing wail of Neville. The din grew fainter as, driven by his will, Glover shot up the now-vacant shaft.

Sam watched as an arcane bolt caught the last of the three drones that had escorted him. Its armor bubbled and darkened. With a burst that sent shards of the device in all directions, the drone exploded, its ammunition cooked off in the magical heat.

A fragment whizzed past his head, scoring his cheek before its tumbling flight buried it several centimeters deep into the wall behind him. He cried out from the sudden pain.

Hyde-White turned to face him. Red-rimmed eyes bored into his own.

"So it is you. You should have heeded the warning, Samuel Verner, You've only brought death upon yourself by coming here."

"Don't be so sure, monster," Sam blurred.

The druid laughed, a deep booming sound. "Monster? Is that anyway to describe a person who only seeks the well-being of his fellows?"

Hyde-White's reaction puzzled Sam. The savagery of the druid's fight with the drones had been unexpectedly replaced by a calm, and somehow sinister, playfulness. Sam didn't know Hyde-White's game, but every minute the druid talked gave Sam a chance to think of something to do. Unfortunately, every minute also increased the chances that the druid would get reinforcements.

"Your deeds speak loudly enough of your nature.

For all that you look like a man, you're not human."

Hyde-White sighed. He looked around for a moment, then sauntered to a chair that remained mostly intact and threw himself down.

"You had me fooled for a moment. I suppose I should have known better. I have been an initiate of my magical tradition for more years than you have walked this wounded earth. It was ridiculous to even entertain the thought that you might have penetrated the mask. I expect I was misled by your potential." Sam was confused by Hyde-White's ramblings. "You look so perplexed. It's quite a wonder." The fat man chuckled. "Since your death is inevitable now, the mask doesn't matter anymore. Shall I let you see the truth? You won't like it, and I suppose you might even find it a little frightening, which is all to the good. Fear adds a wonderfully subtle flavor." Hyde-White stood up again and stretched languidly.

The stretch seemed to go on beyond the bounds of his flesh. He grew taller and slimmer. His arms lengthened, as did his legs, and the clothes covering his body changed to become a white pelt. Wrinkled, liverspotted hands widened and darkened as fingers elongated into taloned digits. His facial features melted and re-formed into a bestial visage.

The thing that had hidden in the shape of HydeWhite looked down at Sam and smiled a carnivore's smile. Like a stage magician signalling a completed trick, he gave a twisting Sick of his hand and said, "You see, I haven't been human for decades."

Sam stumbled back from the divider behind which he had crouched, and bumped into a wall. He straightened up, letting the wall take some of his weight. Otherwise, he feared his knees would buckle.

The stench of decay and corruption emanating from the furred apparition was almost overpowering. Sam had expected the smell after his invasion of the sanctum, but he hadn't expected to see what he was seeing. Like the odor, the being's silhouette was familiar from his troubled dreams and frustrated attempts to enhance his magical power. He had seen a similar creature when they had raided the Circle's murder ritual. Both Willie and Dodger were right and wrong. Hyde-White was a wendigo, but he was very much alive.

"You were the Man of Light."

It was the wendigo's turn to look confused. "The what?"

"The one who blocked my path to the totem realms."

"Ah. You use the past tense, implying that you have breached the barriers I set in your mind. This is unfortunate. When I touched your astral form on the Solstice, and learned who you were, I sought to save you from yourself. You have been very persistent, as I should have expected from one with so strong a will. Perhaps I was not so foolish to worry about your ability to pierce the mask."

Sam shuddered as the wendigo spoke. All lingering thoughts that the Man of Light was something he had dredged from his own subconscious vanished. His mind had been violated, his memories subverted by the wendigo. He felt sick and revulsed. He felt hatred. "You bastard! I'm not a toy for you to play with. I'm a man, you godless, soulless beast! You fragged with my mind just to frighten me away from the power I needed to stop you."

"Stop me? A pup like you?" The wendigo laughed. "That's rich. But then, she said you had a strange sense of humor.''

The muscles in Sam's face went slack. He felt chill all over as he remembered his not entirely strategic reason for selecting Hyde-White as the first target. "Janice," he whispered.

"Of course, Janice. You knew she was here, didn't you?" The wendigo paused to study Sam's expression. "I see you did. So it was she who motivated you to come after me. So much for noble motives. It does always seem to be kinbonds that motivate the hunters. I, of all people, should not have forgotten the power of that draw."

Indignation fueled Sam's anger. "How dare you call yourself a person? You're a murderer, an eater of human flesh, and a corrupter of minds. You have forfeited any claim of humanity. God as my witness, you have forfeited your right to life."

"What right have you to judge me?" The wendigo pointed an accusing finger at Sam. "You are of the blood of man, a scion of the long line of corrupters of the earth itself. The human race has fouled its nest since its infancy. Humanity is the true despoiler, and I am relieved that I am no longer a part of that desecration. Were you able to understand your place in nature as I do mine, you would see the truth.

"By blood, I am born of the earth and I act as my blood directs. By temperament, I have responded to the atrocities your precious humanity has visited upon its collective mother, and have learned to call the corrupted spirits of the earth. I will see the vermin of humanity scoured from the face of the planet they have defiled. I will turn the corruption back upon the real evildoers. All you need to do is look around yourself to see that I speak the truth. If you were truly moral, you would join my crusade."

Sam felt the tug of the wendigo's words. He, too, hated what man had done to the environment. He felt his despair and frustration curdle into rage over the thought of the betrayed trust. Then, he remembered the filthy feel of the wendigo's previous presence in his mind and shouted. "Liar! You twist the truth to suit yourself, and I won't fall for it. You 're the corruptor, the seducer, the defiler, and the despoiler. You're evil by nature, and I will destroy you."

The wendigo let out a low growl through clenched teeth. Then his lips closed down over his fangs, and he smiled.

"If I am evil, what of your sister?"

"I won't let you hurt her."

"Hurt her?" The wendigo laughed. "I have no reason to hurt one of my own. You are her past and I am her future. She no longer belongs to your world, but to mine. Forget her."

That was something Sam would never do. He felt guilty enough over how little he had accomplished in finding her. "Where is she?"

"She is safe from your misguided attentions. When Glover told me of the disturbance at ATT-Multifax, I thought it best to take precautions."

"What have you done with her?"

"Brought her into the fold."

"No!"

"Oh, yes."

"No!" Sam screamed again. He threw himself away from the wall and summoned his magic. Howling the words of Dog's song, he poured his will into the effort of summoning a spirit. As soon as he felt a presence, he demanded service of it.

A luminous mist rose from the floor. Streamers of mist floated from the walls to join the cloud beginning to swirl in the space between Sam and the wendigo. The mist thickened, becoming almost liquid in density, and poured upwards to form a shape as if filling a mold. The last of the vapor joined the hulking shape, and the whole thing became more solid, taking on the texture of poured concrete.

The floor groaned under the weight of the manifested building spirit. Between its wide, humped shoulders there was a knob that might have been a head. Two pits of darkness opened in the knob, and Sam felt the spirit's attention settle on him.

The spirit's stare unnerved him even more than the realization that he had succeeded in summoning it. The spirit's intensity, underlaid by hostility, scraped stainless steel fingernails on the chalkboard that was the inside of his skull. The spirit was insistent; it wanted his orders, for only by discharging its duties could it leave the physical plane.

"Destroy the wendigo," he told it. "End the blight on the city.''

The spirit turned away abruptly. Spreading its arms, it advanced on the wendigo. Each step sent tremors through the floor.

Sam had expected that his enemy might show some fear at this sudden manifestation of power. He was disappointed. The wendigo began to vocalize. The sound started as a deep rumble in the massive chest and occasionally burst forth in a feral growl. The stench of putrefaction increased as the wendigo also spread his arms wide.

The spirit lumbered forward and raised one blocky, fistless arm to smash its victim. The wendigo stood his ground. His only action was to convulse his outstretched fingers closed into fists.

The spirit froze as pain flared in Sam's head. The mystic bonds by which he directed the spirit tattered and tore. He tried to re-form them, but they slipped through his grasp.

Across the room, the spirit turned. The smooth, seamless lines of its form had become more jagged, and its facade was pitted and marred. Like lurid tattoos, graffiti and slogans of violence defaced its surface. It took a step toward Sam. Portions of its outer covering flaked away as it moved. It stalked toward him, leaving footprints of garbage and sludgy residue. The wendigo gloated. "A poor choice, puppy shaman. Cities are one of the great blights that man spreads across the earth. Know now, if you had not already discerned it for yourself, that Blight is my totem. I have embraced the toxic defilement of the earth to turn it back on the source of the pollution. This cold, concrete tower has no true hearth. By its nature, the spirit you have summoned is more my servant than yours. All you have done is given me the tool for your destruction."

Janice was worried as soon as she heard the explosion. Her failure to get through on the telecom only intensified her concern. Suddenly Dan's uncharacteristic request, that she carry a message to a business partner who lived on a lower floor of the tower, made sense. It had just been an excuse to get her out of the residence.

She detached her spirit and sent it upwards through the building. Dan was there and well, but he was being menaced by a hostile spirit. The shaman who had summoned it was there as well, fully capable of more mischief. Since she hadn't yet learned the secrets of casting magic through her astral body, she fled downwards and returned to her physical body.

Hoping to reach the residence in time to help her lover, she ran to the elevator lobby. In her excitement, she fumbled her first try to enter Dan's code. She got it right on the second try, but there was no response, not even a call acknowledgment.

The shaft was the only one with direct access to the residence floor. Frustrated, she slammed her fist into the door. The metal buckled. She hit the door again and a gap appeared between the two panels. She dug her fingers into the space and pulled until she forced the seal. As the pressure lock released, her strength proved too much for the structures. The left panel buckled and jammed, while the right folded and slipped out of its track. She flung the useless thing behind her.

The shaft smelled of magic, making her fur rise.

She stuck her head out over the abyss and looked down. The bottom of the shaft was obscured in a dust cloud. That puzzled her until she realized that there were no cables in the shaft. Someone had sabotaged the elevator, and there would be no car arriving to carry her to the residence.

She leaned into the opening she had forced, keeping her balance with one hand gripping the frame of the opening. With her free hand, she grabbed the rungs of the emergency service ladder and tugged. To her relief, it seemed solid enough to support her weight. Careless of the jagged metal edges protruding in her way, she swung into the shaft. The gashes she sustained began to heal as she started to climb.

The elevator doors on Hyde-White's residence level buckled and blew inward with explosive force. There was no roar of explosives, only the metallic scream of tortured metal and the shattering pop of plastics. Hart knew magic when she encountered its effect.

Toylike, a four-wheeled silver thing rolled out from under one of the lobby's low tables and took up station in front of the opening. As the machine pulled into place, its turret swiveled to point a gun barrel into the shaft.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the drone began firing its weapon in shrill hiccups of shortduration autonre bursts. Hart heard bullets spanging off metal and concrete, but there was another sound as well, a high pitched whang which a norm would be unable to hear. The source of the sound appeared, as Glover drifted out of the shaft. Flares of light accompanied the strange sounds as bullets struck an invisible shield that protected the archdruid.

The drone briefly ceased fire as Glover drifted over it and touched down on the thick carpet. The drone revved its motor and began to circle him, firing bursts at different portions of his anatomy in a random timing sequence. Glover watched contemptuously as the drone sought a weakness in his defense. On the third circle, Glover lashed out with his foot, deflecting the drone's course. Before its onboard expert system could compensate, the little machine hit a piece of debris from the doors and bounced into the air. It came down on its right front fender and toppled forward. Its momentum was so great that it rolled right through the open doorway of the elevator shaft.

"Pathetic gadfly," Glover sneered as the machine vanished from sight.

Hart dropped her invisibility spell and pointed her pistol at Glover.

"Shouldn't have dropped the levitation spell, archdruid. You don't have an invitation to this party."

Glover started at her words, but recovered quickly. "I have no further need for it and I don't need any invitations, elf. You are no impediment to me. I presume you were watching and saw how ineffectual guns are against a magician of my skills and power." "I saw."

"You don't seem properly impressed." "Oh, I was impressed. That bullet shield is a real powerful trick, but I've got a few of my own."

She dropped her aim to the floor by his feet and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. The first explosive bullet shredded the carpet and pitted the floor. Its concussive force tossed the archdruid from his feet. The second bullet chewed through the flooring and into the subflooring, and the third punched through the ceiling of the floor below. The destruction was so rapid that the stages were indistinguishable to he eye. When gravity reclaimed Glover, it pulled him through the new hole. As he passed through the opening, Hart saw the shock and surprise on his face, but he looked physically unhurt. She was surprised at the effectiveness of his protection spell.

Hart approached the gap cautiously, carefully testing the footing before trusting her weight to the weakened floor. Looking over the edge, she saw Glover lying on top of a pile of debris. His clothes were dusted over by late-falling chunks and settling dust. She had hoped the fall would kill the archdruid; it hadn't. He was dazed though and had dropped whatever spells he was maintaining. As a mage herself, she knew the strict concentration necessary to maintain powerful spells.

"Are you awake, Archdruid Glover?"

He groaned. Conscious, but not composed enough for magic.

"I actually came loaded for bigger game, but a good hunter never passes up an opportunity."

She fired three more times. Without the protection of his spell, he was just meat. Then, he was no more.

Sam crashed into things as he ran. He needed time to gather his wits. Walls and furniture that were impediments and bludgeoning obstacles to him did nothing to slow the corrupted building spirit; it just walked through them as if the object wasn't there. The only things it detoured around were plants and the thieves' cache of art objects scattered around the residence. Fortunately, the spirit was moving more slowly than he, as its summoner, knew it could. Under control of the wendigo, the spirit seemed inclined to play with its prey.

Gunfire from one of the drones reminded Sam of Willie. The plan had called for her to concentrate on dealing with physical threats while he handled the magic, Her drone's lack of success against the wendigo in his Hyde-White guise had put the monster in Sam's purview. Sam hoped she was doing better against the security guards who were probably storming up the stairwells by now.

Collision with a musty tapestry told him where he was in the maze of the residence. The wendigo's sanctum was hidden behind the hanging. Its magical barrier would probably stop the spirit, but the small room would be a trap where the wendigo could deal with him at leisure.

But, he realized, what would halt the spirit would blind it as well. In a desperate burst of speed, he cut around to the side of the sanctum, placing its barrier between him and the spirit. A groan like overstressed steel told him that the spirit had lost sight of him. If it hadn't been limited by the manifestation, he would never have been able to pull off this little trick. Sam ran down the first hallway and cut right, trying to keep the sanctum between him and where he thought the spirit was. The longer he could keep it up, the further away he could get. Breathing heavily and lungs burning, he stumbled into one of the few enclosed chambers of the residence floor.

For now, he could run no more. He leaned his back against a wall and let himself slide down to the floor. Opening the seal on his leather jacket, he reached inside and closed his hand on the tooth. Peace, he told himself. Peace to find the center. His breathing slowed and his fear-fogged thoughts began to focus.

He envisioned the building spirit clumping toward him. He visualized the strings of power that bound it to the building. Tracing their flow from the essence of the structure, he followed the threads to the spirit's manifestation. Because he had summoned the spirit, he knew how those mana threads were twined and knotted as they stretched to twist through the boundary of astral space. Without such a connection, the spirit would not have been able to manifest on the mundane plane. Sam felt along the strands of power, seeking to untangle them.

Sooner than he expected, a groping, handless arm thrust through the partition. A second limb followed, then the rest of the spirit emerged through the wall. It was only a meter away. Sam could smell the mold and rotting garbage odor of it as it cocked one arm back to smash him.

He tugged on the astral strings.

The manifestation jerked. Sam tugged again, harder. The spirit staggered back a step and lost a bit of its substantiality. Digging mental fingers into the strands of power, Sam pried and pulled. As he unraveled the binding of the spirit's form, its physcal shape lost coherence, returning first to the liquid mist and then to nothingness. He had banished his summoning. It was a short-lived victory.

The wendigo trotted through the door to the chamber. He betrayed no surprise. Having been in control of the spirit, he would have felt its dissolution.

"An excellent banishment, if unexpected. You rebuke my nonchalance, and rightly so. She is coming and it will be better for all of us if you are dead by then." The wendigo bared his fangs and advanced, taloned fingers extended. "It is time for the end."

Sam knew he was no physical match for the threemeter monster, but he scrambled to his feet, anyway. He crouched, presenting a smaller target. He hoped. The wendigo was stronger and faster than he was. Staring death in the face and having no better idea, he dove forward, surprising the wendigo and slipping beneath the outstetched paws. But Sam was not fast enough to escape unscathed. The wendigo whirled and raked Sam across the back, slicing fringe into a scattering of leather scraps and cutting through to shred the jacket and its lining. Four rows of fire burned into Sam's upper torso. The impact knocked him to the floor and beneath of the sweep of the wendigo's second swipe.

Sam rolled away, trying to gain enough room to get to his feet again. Pain seared through him as he flexed his muscles to keep moving. Each time his back hit the floor, the agony spiked.

An immense vise closed on his right ankle and he knew his maneuver had failed. The wendigo lifted him by his ankle and he dangled in the monster's grip. The Ares Predator slipped from its holster, whacking Sam's elbow as it fell. His arm went numb.

"I thought you were Dog, not Rabbit," the wendigo scoffed.

Inexplicably, the wendigo howled in pain and flung

Sam away.

Sam was parallel to the floor when he hit the wall. Pain exploded in his chest and he blacked out for a second. He came to on the floor. His ears were ringing and he felt like he was going to vomit. His left leg was twisted underneath him. He felt no pain from it, but by the angle, he knew it had to be broken. It hurt to breathe, causing sharp stabbing pains in his chest. Ribs broken too, he thought. No more running now.

The wendigo was clawing at the back of his left shoulder as if madly trying to scratch an itch. He roared in rage and pain. Sam heard a metallic click, and the wendigo straightened up, one arm wrapped across his chest to hold the opposite shoulder. "Over here, furface."

With the ringing in his ears, Sam thought he did well to recognize the voice as female.

The wendigo turned to face the newcomer's voice. Sam could see blood leaking from beneath the blackskinned hand. Even through the scratches that the wendigo's own talons had made were closing as Sam watched, the monster still bled from the weapon wound.

"You too. I should have known."

"Payback time, furface."

The wendigo dodged to one side and a whirring metal disk rushed through the space he had occupied. The weapon buried itself in the wall over Sam's head. He looked up. It was a spoked wheel with a series of wickedly sharp curved blades along its perimeter. It was a signature design, a shuriken in the shape of a Katherine's wheel.

"Hart," Sam croaked.

He could just catch glimpses of her beyond the bulk of the wendigo. She was a wraith in black leather, night to the day of the wendigo's white fur. Her right hand was cocked back, another of the shurikens ready to throw. In her left she carried a heavy pistol. Having watched the fruitless attacks of Willie's drones, Sam knew the gun would do little harm to the wendigo. The wendigo himself seemed contemptuous of it as well; his attention focused on the hand that held the throwing weapon. It must be the metal. Some awakened beings had allergic reactions to certain metals.

For long moments the two opponents feinted. Each seemed unwilling to commit to a move that might open an attack line for the other. Hart's hand blurred forward suddenly, unleashing a glittering star toward the wendigo. He shifted to his right fast enough that the shuriken whizzed past. He had anticipated her throw, but had not foreseen the diving roll to her right that she made as soon as the throwing weapon left her hand. He checked his charge and started to turn to her new location. Hart fired from the floor and the wendigo's right hand vanished in an explosion of blood and shattered bone fragments.

The wendigo's howl nearly deafened Sam. The sound, which should have been full of pain, carried nothing but outrage. He thought he heard the scream re-echo through the residence as the monster recovered from his surprise and charged Hart.

Trying to stand, Hart missed with her next two shots. The bullets blew craters in the wall. As Sam had done, she tried to duck under the sweep of the wendigo's arms. Also like Sam, she wasn't fast enough. One arm caught her in the hip and sent her spinning into a bookshelf. Covered in blood, she collapsed in a pile of books, artifacts, and simsense cartridges.

In two steps the wendigo reached her, but instead of going for her, he grabbed the top of the bookcase with his remaining hand and tugged. The heavy wooden shelves creaked as they leaned out from the walls, the anchor bolts squealing as they pulled free from their moorings. The shelves crashed down just as Hart scrambled out of their way on her hands and knees.

"Do something, dogboy!" she shouted at Sam.

"Throw a spell! Call a spirit! Do something!"

What could he do? He had called a spirit already and the wendigo had corrupted it and turned it back against him with contemptuous ease. What could he do against such powerful magic? He was just a Dog shaman.

He was\a151

He was in a forest glade in the middle of a city, sitting on the grass. A mongrel sat by his side.

"Dog!" Sam exclaimed.

"Man," Dog said, mimicking Sam's intonation. "I was wondering when you'd get to me."

"I thought you were always with me?"

"I am. You're just not always with me. " "I don't know what to do, Dog. Tell me," Sam pleaded.

"Tell you? You're the one out in the world, man. You've got to make your own decisions. You wanna be a pup all your life, that's okay. 7 can live with it, but you can't, 'cause it ain't gonna be a long life if you don't wake up and smell the world like it is. "The world smells like death." "That's the wendigo talking. I thought you were a man." "lam."

"So show me," Dog yelped. "The men I know don't give up so easily. Fight it, man." "I don't know how," Sam complained. "If you don't despair, you do." Somewhere else, the wendigo advanced on Hart. She drew a dagger from her belt. The orichalcum symbols inlaid in the blade's side glowed slightly, the power of that most magic of metals would enable the blade's kiss to wound the wendigo. But it was only a dagger; he had talons and fangs, and was more than twice her mass.

"He'll kill her," Sam said to Dog. "Yup," Dog agreed jauntily. "Then you. Then lots more people. You gonna stop him?" "What can I do?"

"Where's your faith? Us dog types believe in you men types."

Somewhere else, the wendigo smashed the dagger out of Hart's hand. The disarming move cost him a deep gash in his forearm, but he seemed content with the trade. His return strike was an open slap that caught Hart on her right temple. She tried to roll with the blow but the force was too much. She went down.

"She's got no hope, Dog."

"She's got you. Show some spirit, man." Sam felt utterly stupid. Dog had been telling him what he had to do all along, and he was just being dense. The wendigo had turned the building's spirit because it was primarily the spirit of the place; and places, no matter how pure they had been, could be corrupted. Places were just things made to be used. But people were more than things. Certainly they were physical bodies, but they were more as well, hearts and souls. Hearts could be corrupted too, but the soul's purest essence was not so easily swayed. Confused, tricked, and misled for a while, perhaps; but not forever, as long as there was hope and faith and belief in the ultimate goodness of life.

The wendigo had embraced death and despair, but even his creed was tainted with hope. Though the wendigo called Blight his totem and walked a toxic path, he still saw a hopeful end. He used his corrupt tools in his warped fight to rid the earth of what he considered a plague. His was a terrible path, but ultimately a misguided one. For the shaman, Sam suddenly felt pity. For the wendigo nature of the being he felt no such pity. The being it had been deserved the pity, but that being had long since died inside the great furred body.

Sam opened himself to the spirit world. Brighton Centrum was full of people, full of life. He avoided the dark corners and sought the light. In a rundown squat of a shack cobbled together in the mall space of a section scheduled for reconstruction, he found what he wanted. Nurtured by the love and hope of a family who had taken all the drek that life had thrown at them and stayed a family, a spirit dwelled here. It was a little grungy around the edges, but it had never known despair.

Sam sang the song Dog had taught him, wooing the spirit. At first it seemed deaf to his pleas, but at last it heard the song and stirred. Sam coaxed it from its place with flattery and fed it his strength. The spirit drifted through the distanceless space and joined him. Sam rejoiced. He spoke to it of the urgency of his need. Its aura pulsed, flaring in indignation and rage as he told it of the wendigo. The spirit allowed him to sculpt its raw purity into a concentrated crystal of diamond clarity and adamantine strength. All the while, Dog sang counterpoint. As Sam returned his consciousness to the mundane world, the wendigo pinned Hart beneath his foot. He leaned forward, putting his weight onto her chest. Sam heard her ribs crack. He feared for her life, but he was not distracted from the song. If he gave in to the fear, all hope would truly be lost.

The spirit forged of man's nature manifested as a small child. It was dirty and wore ragged castoff clothing. It held a pipe in its right hand which it smacked grimly into the palm of its left. "Yo, furball!" it called.

The wendigo turned his head at the new interruption. His eyes narrowed and nostrils distended as he drank in the power of the spirit. "You gotta go, furball," the spirit said. The wendigo moved faster than Sam had ever seen him do before. The foot that had been crushing the life out of Hart swept around toward the manifestion. The spirit blocked with one hand on either end of the pipe, stopping the blow dead. The spirit then slid its upper hand down to the lower, raised the pipe above its head, and slammed it into the wendigo's still-raised leg. The room shook as the wendigo crashed to the floor. The splintered ends of bones protruded from his leg.

The spirit's assault didn't slow. Its pipe blurred up and down, pummeling the wendigo. The spirit's strength was magical, unconstrained by its physical appearance. The wendigo was no match for its fury.. Soon, he lay helpless.

The spirit drove the end of the pipe through the wendigo's left shoulder and into the floor. With two swift hammer blows of its tiny fist, it bent the pipe over, forming a staple that pinned the wendigo to the floor. The fight seemed to go out of the wendigo and he lay limp on the floor. He watched fearfully as the spirit knelt on his chest and placed a hand on either side of his broad head. Their eyes locked, and the wendigo screamed.

The air seemed charged with electricity, but Sam knew it was magic. He slipped into his astral senses and saw the storm of mana that raged between the spirit and the wendigo. Glowing like a sun, the spirit poured golden light from its eyes into the wendigo's dark orbs. At first, all that glorious light fought against streamers of darkness that emanated from the wendigo's eyes and wrapped around the twin columns of light as if to smother them. Seconds later\a151or was it hours?\a151the dark wrappings started to fade until they finally turned translucent and drifted away like smoke. The body of the wendigo began to glow from inside as the golden light poured into him from the spirit. The spirit grew dimmer as the wendigo grew brighter and brighter, until Sam could no longer bear the intensity. Just before he dropped back to his mundane senses, he thought he saw a shape within the wendigo's form. But the glare made it too hard to be sure.

On the mundane plane, the wendigo's body looked shrunken, a bag of skin over a frame of bone. The spirit stood by the side of the body and pulled the pipe free.

"The darkness is gone," it said in a voice only Sam could hear.

"You have done all that I could ask, spirit. I can think of no better way to thank you than by giving you your freedom."

"You would do this for me? I still owe you services."

"We fought a common foe. You owe me nothing, and I ask nothing more of you. You are free."

"Honor to you, man," the spirit said as it faded from sight.

Sam could have followed its departure astrally. He wanted to. He desperately wanted to know where the spirit would go. But somehow that didn't seem right.

He crawled past the husk of the wendigo toward Hart. Her breathing was ragged and shallow, and he hurried even though he knew that he was aggravating his own injuries. Pain seemed a small price to pay to be by her side. He touched her face with his hands and found that she was crying. She stirred at his touch and opened her eyes. It took her a few seconds to recognize him. Once she did, she tried to raise her arm.

"Wrist," she gasped.

Trying not to hurt her, Sam unsnapped the cuff and rolled back her sleeve. Sam recognized the name and logo of DocWagon on the circuit board embedded within the clear plastic band she wore. The base color of the board was platinum.

"Don't leave home without it." She tried to smile at him, but the effort to talk had exhausted her waning strength.

He pressed the stud that would summon the medical service.

His own injuries sapped his strength, but he knew that unless he did something foolish, he would probably live. He was not so sure about her. After all she had done to keep him from stopping the wendigo, she had risked her life to save him and give him the time to call the spirit.

"Why?" he asked.

"I wish I knew."

She passed out.

By the time Janice reached the residence floor, everything was quiet. That made her nervous. She had heard his last scream. It had been so full of pain that she feared for his safety. How could anything have happened to him? He was stronger than any norm shaman.

She skirted the hole on the entryway floor. Unlike in the elevator shaft, there was no strong residue of magic. The destruction here was purely physical.

The doors of the formal entrance were open. Through them wafted the faint odor of blood. Tense and alert, she padded through the archway.

There were a lot of scents in the air, but all were faint; the floor's climate control system was busy pumping warm air out the shattered northern window wall and diluting the concentrations below the level she could track. Still, she identified the scent of strangers lingering in the air. One, a male, was vaguely familiar, but the other, a female, was new to her. There was also the ozone tang of machines like the one that had almost struck her in the elevator shaft. That odor was strong enough to indicate that there might be several of the things; they didn't have enough individuality for her to tell if there had been only the one or if more might be lurking about. The machine had been small enough to hide effectively.

The one scent she most wanted to smell was the most elusive.

A high-pitched, sequenced beeping reached her. It was beyond the range of a norm hearing, or even an elf's. It was clearly a signal. She knew of nothing in the residence that would emit such a noise; the device must belong to the intruders. She listened carefully, then shifted position and listened again. The sound seemed to be originating somewhere east of the sanctum. She moved cautiously toward the source.

As she drew nearer, her apprehension grew. With the air flow moving toward her the odors, all of them, grew stronger. Dan's was among them. But her momentary flare of relief was snuffed by the realization that the intruder's signal continued. Dan would not have let it continue if he were able to stop it. Worse, she sensed a lingering tingle of magic.

She stopped before one of the studies where blood spattered the floors and walls. Beyond the hallway in one of the large living areas, she could see a crater in the wall. From somewhere out of sight around a partition, she could hear a male voice whispering assurances. It was not Dan's voice. She crept forward.

She reached the corner, and her wary peering rewarded her with a sight that tore her heart. Dan's body lay sprawled on the floor. His limp form was emaciated, his bones pressing against his once-glossy pelt. The white fur was fouled and matted with blood. A great, gaping wound covered his left shoulder, and his right hand, the hand that had stroked her so tenderly, was missing. It had been jaggedly severed and was nowhere in sight. Her caution and fear were swept away. She rushed from concealment and threw herself on him. He was so still. She didn't want to believe he was dead, but her eyes could only see the blood and the wounds. Her ears could not hear him breathe, and her touch found only chill. He was far colder than he should be. Tears streamed from her eyes, blurring her sight. Her ears filled with the sounds of great sobs which she knew were her own. She felt him cold under her hands and wanted to deny what she felt. It was not possible, he couldn't be dead.

"Fragging drek, Twist. It's got a mate." The words broke through her grief. Those words were meant for the norm shaman and whispered from his earpiece receiver, but she heard them. She raised her tear-blurred eyes and looked at the intruders for the first time.

The woman lay against a wall, unconscious and nearly dead. The man was the shaman she had seen raising the spirit against Dan. He was battered and covered with blood. Though his face was screwed into a rictus of pain, he was struggling to prop up his torso. In one hand he held a dagger of red-gold metal, but he seemed otherwise unarmed. Save for his magic, she reminded herself. One of the machines sat near his head; the gun barrel of the tiny turret pointed directly at her.

These were the ones who had taken Dan from her.

She sat back on her heels, noting as she did that the machine's gun tracked her motion. Ignoring them she passed a gentle hand along Dan's face. They had closed his eyes. Her fingers lingered on his lips. They had stolen his smile. She let her hand trail down to his chest. They had stilled his heart.

She focused her intent, wrapping herself in the illusion that she was as she had been, grieving over Dan's body. Beneath the image, she crouched in readiness.

They would die.

She leapt.

Her illusion vanished as she moved. The killers finally reacted, but, they were too late. The gun turret could not swivel fast enough to track her. The shaman was too weak to come close to matching her speed. She was already in the air and soon she would rend them.

She slammed into an invisible wall, and her lethal pounce was converted into an ignominious tumble to the floor. She felt her mind teeter on the brink of madness\a151the magical barrier tasted of Dan.

As she turned to his body, she found his head turned slightly in her direction. His eyelids seemed to be open, but she could not see the glitter of his eyes.

She returned to him and kissed his lips. Her joy faltered. He was cold, and his chest remained still. And yet, with no air in his lungs to force the sounds out of his throat, he spoke.

"I could not let you do it."

She probed with all her senses and only confused herself. He was there but not there. She wanted him alive. Her tears fell upon his face but not a muscle twitched. She didn't know what to do.

"No kindeath. The blood is too strong. It taints. It's so heavy. It taints. For you, my darling, I fear it would be fatal."

She combed his mane with her talons. "Be quiet, my love. I shall sing the healing songs for you."

"No songs. The meat is finished, and the feaster is no more. From the brink of the dark I heard you weep for me, and your tears, your love, let me save you this once."

"Save me? I would have killed them for you."

"No," his sepulcral voice insisted. "Promise me.

Forswear the kindeath."

"What are you saying, my love? What is this kindeath?"

"Promise."

His voice had become fainter and echoed hollowly, but she recognized his force of will in the demand.

"Anything. I promise. No kindeath. Whatever you want. Just come back to me," she pleaded.

"The Dog shaman. He is your brother."

With that dire pronouncement, Janice felt him leave and knew that all Dan Shiroi had been was gone. Forever. She poured her anguish into her scream.

Sam could not believe what he was hearing. The voice from the dead wendigo was something he feared would haunt his nightmares. But as terrifying as that was, the words the voice spoke were worse. Was this great furry thing, this female wendigo, his sister Janice? God could not be so cruel.

He shifted to astral perception and studied the being's aura. He knew now how to recognize a wendigo aura, and he had no doubt that he was seeing one. But he had not been magically active the last time he had seen his sister. Nor had she gone through the change. How would he know if this was she? He could not be sure. Like a half-remembered dream, something in the being's aura nagged with familiarity.

"Janice?"

The red-rimmed eyes that turned to him were bleak.

The face in which they were set was totally unfamiliar. He could not find a hint of his sister's fair features. He had already heard this wendigo's voice and found nothing to recognize in it.

"Sam?"

His throat constricted when he heard her pronounce his name, "Sa-am." His doubts fled. "Lord in Heaven, it is you."

There was so much to say, but Sam couldn't find the words. Ever since he had heard of her goblinization, he had feared for her. His attempts to contact her through Renraku had been inexplicably stifled. But he had never forgotten her, never stopped trying to figure out a way to contact her. She stood before him now and the moment was nothing like any he had imagined. He had been afraid kawaru had left her an ork, or worse, a troll\a151but this! Ever since he had learned what wendigo were, he had hated them. Janice only stared at him, her dark eyes an enigma. Finally he stammered, "I want to help." "Where were you when I needed you before?" she asked accusingly. "I tried to-"

"If you had really fragging tried, you would have done something. Dan was there when I needed him. You abandon me, then you come back into my life, and you take him away from me. You want to help me? Bring him back." "But he was a wendigo."

"And what do you think / am?" she shouted, slamming a great paw against her chest. "There has to be a way to help you." Her laughter was bitter. "And I grew up thinking / was the romantic and you were the practical one. There's no redemption for me. Don't you see I'm already damned?"

"I can't believe that you just let her leave." Estios stormed back and forth across the short space afforded him. The apartment was one of Hart's safehouses. The back room had been roomy for Willie and her rigger board, but with all the runners gathered, space was at a premium. Most of the fine furniture had been pushed back against the walls to make room for the Mitsuhama Medical Technologies Home Convalesence Bed in which Hart lay. The runners, both the unscathed and the wounded, and their gear looked absurdly out of place among the wainscoting, natural fiber rugs, and timber-beamed ceiling.

As soon as Estios passed him, Dodger stuck a foot into the open space. Estios's attention was focused on Sam; he remained unaware of the obstruction as he retraced his path. Teresa elbowed Dodger in the ribs and he retracted his foot just before Estios would have stumbled over it.

Monitoring the readouts on the MMT bed, Sam was only half-aware of Estios's ravings. Sam was no expert, but he thought the readings indicated that Hart should be conscious. Though her eyes remained closed and she didn't respond when he whispered her name, he felt sure she was awake, refusing to acknowledge anything around her.

He was afraid that he was what she was avoiding. But it might have been that she didn't want to deal with the loud-mouthed Estios, or maybe she just wanted to rest. Either made sense. They had all been through a lot and no one wanted to hear Estios rant.

Sam looked around the room. Dodger and Teresa were holding a private conversation where they sat on the long couch. They were intense and Dodger looked unhappy. Willie sat hunched over her rigger board and was ostentatiously busy with the controls. Father Rinaldi, when they had been exchanging tales in the Shidhe holding cell, had told Sam that he disliked any kind of computer-human interface, but he was helping Willie watch the viewscreen. From what little Sam could see of the pictures relayed from her spotter drones, nothing much was happening. Obviously, Janice was still inside the rundown tenement where she had gone to ground.

Sam suddenly realized Estios had stopped talking and was looking at him. The elf must have asked a question. With no memory of having heard the question, Sam had no hope of answering it.

"Look," he said with a sigh. "It's over. The Circle's broken."

"Weren't you listening? It's not over as long as

Ashton and Wallace are still out there."

"If you're so worried about them, go do something about it. I think they were just minor players. With the others all dead, especially the wendigo who built the Circle and fed them the power they thought their sacrifices gained them, they won't be a problem. An anonymous message to the Lord Protector's Oversight Board will get them their comeuppance."

"They might still escape and recruit new members. Even if they do not, the monster's mate is still out there."

Sam buried his face in his hands and tried to massage away the anger he felt toward the obtuse Estios. "Forget her. She wasn't part of the Circle." "I can't forget her. She's a wendigo. That's enough reason for her to die."

Sam got to his feet. His ribs ached within the restraint of his torso bandage. He was wobbly, but the walking cast on his leg made a limping shuffle possible. He hobbled across to Estios and looked up into the elf's face.

"You're not going to kill her." Estios curled his lip; he put his hand on Sam's chest and shoved him backward. Sam landed in a chair with an agonizing shock that sent a wave of blackness and wheeling lights across his vision. He was glad he had fallen in the cushioned chair; hitting the floor or a wall might have caused him to pass out. He didn't think Estios would have cared.

"You're too emotionally involved, Verner. I will assume that the painkillers have fogged your reasoning, and overlook your criminal shortsightedness. She stopped being your sister the day she grew fur." Estios surveyed the room. "We've wasted enough time. Put the drones on standby and transfer control to your van, rigger. Priest, you'll stay here with the wounded. Everybody else, grab your gear. We're going hunting."

Willie looked to Sam. She had never liked Estios and hated taking his orders. She seemed torn between her loyalty to Sam and the weight of the elf's arguments. Her eyes asked for a release from the burden of decision.

Seeing that no one else was going to stand up to Estios, Sam gritted his teeth. There was a table next to the chair, and he grabbed it, hoping to take some of the pressure off his ribs as he attempted to stand. Pain rocked him as he tried, and he collapsed back into the chair.

Dodger was across the room and crouched at Sam's side in an instant. The elf used one hand to steady Sam in the chair while his deft fingers adjusted controls on Sam's torso wrap. There was a brief hiss as more gas pumped into the bandage's tubes to increase its rigidity.

"He's going too far, Teresa," Dodger said. "This is a dangerous plan."

"If you're scared, alley runner, you can stay behind. We'll be playing in the real world where people get really hurt. You wouldn't like it. Why don't you go hide in your electron fantasies?'' Estios took a step toward the couch and held out his hand to Teresa.

Dodger stepped forward. "Don't go with him, Teresa."

Teresa stared past Sam, obviously meeting Dodger's gaze. Sam could see wavering emotions on her face. Dodger was out of Sam's line of sight, but he felt Dodger's tension through the elf's grip on his arm. The grip tightened as Teresa dropped her eyes and took Estios's hand.

Estios helped her up, then bent, retrieved her weapon, and tossed it to her. All the while Estios grinned at Dodger like a kid who had won a prize at a carnival.

"Get a move on, rigger," he said, slapping a hand against the back of Willie's chair. "We've got vermin to exterminate."

Estios reached for his own Steyr, which leaned against the table with the rigger board, and froze as a new voice entered the conversation.

"Touch it and your boss will need a new number one, Ice Eyes."

Hart's voice was hoarse. Her eyes, sunken and dark ringed, were open and burned with fever. Their gaze was fixed on Estios. Her left arm lay across her body, which took most of the weight of the gun she held. She pointed the muzzle at Estios. Sam had no idea where she had gotten the weapon, but she wasn't in any shape to use it effectively. He thought he noticed a slight tremor in her hand.

Estios looked at her, his face stony. Then, apparently dismissing the threat, he started to reach for his gun.

Thunder boomed in the room. Estios recoiled as splinters of wood exploding from the table drew blood from his outstretched hand.

"That was your one warning," Hart said. Her complexion was paler, and fresh sweat plastered locks of hair to her forehead. The recoil from the shot had obviously caused her pain. Her hand shook visibly now. Estios rubbed at his small wounds with the thumb of his uninjured hand.

"Put the gun down, Hart. I could hit you with a power dart before you could fire, and I don't think your spell defense is up to competition levels right now.''

"You can try me, drekhead. It's the only way you'll know.''

Estios appeared to be weighing the odds. Rinaldi reached across and grabbed the Steyr by the muzzle. He set it down again against the wall, well out of Estios's reach.

"I think that you might reconsider your position,

Estios. One cannot condemn a person for possibilities. If that were so, all people would have to be condemned, for we are all capable of crimes. As far as we know, Janice has killed no one yet."

"But she has eaten human flesh," Willie said. "The other wendigo said she was just like him. We know he was a killer."

Rinaldi shifted his stance so that he could speak to Willie without taking his eyes off the stalemate between Hart and Estios.

"We also know he was a liar. If Janice has eaten flesh, then she has committed a crime and a sin. But the crime is not a capital one, and the sin may be forgiven. I do not find it beyond the bounds of reason to think that she was under the influence of the evil she called Dan Shiroi and did not fully know what she did. If she repents, there is hope for her redemption."

"Redemption," Estios repeated in a mocking tone.

"As long as she is a wendigo, she will crave the meat. Tell me, priest. Can you change her back to the way she was, then?"

Sam's heart raced, ignited by hope.

But Rinaldi turned away from Estios and gripped his left hand in his right. He rocked his hands up and down at waist level and shook his head sadly. "Alas, no. But neither can I condone murder. That is what it shall be if you kill her without evidence that she has succumbed completely to the wendigo nature. Coldblooded murder.''

"Let her kills be on your head, then."

Rinaldi shifted as if Estios's suggestion made him nervous. "Her actions are her own responsibility. As yours are your responsibility. Every individual must make his or her own choices."

Each of Rinaldi's minor changes of position had put him closer to Hart's bed. In a sudden lunge, he snatched Hart's gun. She was too weak to fight him as he easily removed the weapon from her grasp. He slipped on the safety and tossed the pistol into a corner.

"As I said, I will not condone murder," he said to

Hart.

She threw back her head and clenched her teeth. Sam could hear her fist pound once against the edge of the bed.

"Nice move," Estios said. "For a priest. Thanks for saving me the trouble."

' 'I did not disarm Hart for you alone,'' Rinaldi said. "And I still maintain that you are premature. Janice must live as her own conscience demands. If she is weak and embraces the demands of her parabiology, I will help you hunt her down."

"I don't want any help from you, priest." "That will not stop me from joining the hunt," Rinaldi said resolutely.

Their casual talk of hunts and death and murder was finally too much for Sam. Janice wasn't an animal.

"Shut up!" he shouted. "Shut up, all of you! There won't be any hunt. She's my sister."

"She's a wendigo," Estios said. "You're a fool to protect her, Verner. That kind of collaboration would get you the death sentence in the Tir. We know how to treat those who help the wendigo. If you think that being her brother will save you from her, you're a double fool. The wendigo is conscienceless evil; it knows no family."

Sam looked at Estios, but his eyes were seeing the events of the previous night. He saw the spirit of humanity wrestle with the spirit of Blight in its wendigo embodiment. He heard the wendigo's voice pleading with Janice. That hollow voice had spoken words that didn't fit Estios's evaluation. Those caring words had come from a husk that had been burned clean of evil, but they had been born of one human spirit, twisted as it was, reaching out to another who responded. He had seen the tears of the wendigo Janice and knew that the human Janice was still alive somewhere inside.

"You just don't understand," Sam insisted. "She's sick."

"You're crazy, Verner," Estios spat back at him.

"She's a killer. She has to be stopped."

"She has killed no one," Rinaldi said. "Hunting her down and killing her would be murder.''

"She's a wendigo. It's necessary," Estios said.

"It's murder," Sam said.

"It's moot," Willie said. "At least for now. I've called back the drones."

"You stupid halfer," Estios screamed. He grabbed his Steyr and headed out the door. "Come on. If we don't hurry, the beast will get away." Teresa slung her weapon and started after him. "Teresa!" Dodger called, stopping her halfway to the door.

"You're not like him, Teresa," Dodger insisted.

"Don't go with him."

She stood still for a full five seconds, then ran out the door. She didn't look back. Dodger slammed his fist into the wall, then sought out a corner and collapsed in it, arms folded over his drooping head. "Willie, what have you done?" Sam asked. "Got rid of a real loser," she said. "Sorry about your bird, Dodger."

"She made her own choice," Dodger said glumly. ' 'But they're going after Janice,'' Sam said. "They'll kill her."

"Neg. She'll be gone. I dropped a drone in to spook her. All they'll find is an empty squat."

"But you have lost her to us as well," Rinaldi pointed out.

"Neg, again. Got a pair of drones still on her tail."

"Clever, Willie," Rinaldi said. "Affirm," the rigger agreed as she returned her full attention to monitoring her drones' progress.

Sam forced himself to ignore the pain and rose to his feet. Unsteadily, he limped to Rinaldi. Taking the priest by his arm, Sam leaned close. "You're an expert on magic, father. Tell me there's a way to cure her. There must be a way."

Rinaldi bowed his head for a moment, then looked Sam in the eyes. "I just don't know, Sam. Science knows next to nothing of the wendigo metatype, and magical tradition adds precious little. If the tales from the north are true, the wendigo nature is a curse. If that is the case, it may be that she can be restored. But if it is a biological change and nothing more, I fear there is little hope. I will pray that your faith and love be rewarded, but I just don't know." "You won't really hunt her, will you?" Rinaldi turned his head away. "First things first, Sam. You and Hart are hurt and must be taken care of. Janice is fresh and strong, while we are tired and weak. I have no doubt she has been well trained in combat and magic by the evil. If we try to restrain her she will fight, and she might kill most of us."

"She would never kill me. I'm her brother." "You could be right. I pray that you are. That might be her way to redemption." Might. Could be. Maybe. Wasn't anything certain? "I'll never be sure, will I, father?" "In this life? I think not, Sam. But one can always pray, and trust in the Lord. He is always with us."

Sam said nothing for a few minutes, quiet as he thought about Janice and about what Rinaldi had said. Finally, he said, "I think you're right, father. I think He will be with me in this. You might even say that He's dogging my path."

Frowning, Rinaldi said, "You sound like a shaman

I once knew."

Sam just smiled. All those mights, could-bes and maybes were full of possibilities. All kinds of possibilities. It was only despair that made the future seem dark. He didn't have to look at it that way and vowed that he wouldn't. Dog had shown him the enlightening and redeeming power of hope.

Sam knew he'd find a way to do what had to be done.