Heartland

I

Is the nature of your trip business or pleasure?"

"Business," I said. I showed the customs agent one of my generic business cards. "Meetings, actually."

He gave the card a cursory glance, as there wasn't much on it. Minimalist design aesthetic, that leave-much-to-the-imagination attitude that made it easier when I had to use a different passport. "Antiques," he said. The corners of his mouth moved up. "In Los Angeles."

"Hollywood," I explained. "Scouting for movie props, and for some private clients. That's why I'm here, actually. I figure if I can open an office in Paris, then-" A well-timed shrug. "-you know, they're all about facades out there."

As compared to here-at Charles de Gaulle Airport-not far from Paris, that glittering cultural center of the universe. But the rule still applied: tell someone what they want to hear, and without meaning to, they let you become invisible.

The agent's stoic expression eased, his lips edging toward a real smile, and he thumbed through several pages of my passport. "Yes," he said, nodding. "They are fascinated with how things look."

Like a well-used passport. He had been doing this job for some time as he had unconsciously started looking to match port of entry stamps with whatever his computer screen was telling him. But the old method of stamping passports was another victim of computerization. A lot of countries didn't even bother stamping the pages anymore, but that didn't wipe away the old rituals, the old way of thinking. Banishing the cultural and muscle memory took longer.

Piotr's contact had liked my suggestion of modeling the travel history on my own. Easier to keep the lies straight that way. The really clever bit had been to reuse a majority of the pages of my old passport so as to include those few places that still did the stamps. Authenticity is a matter of matching enough details to fool the experts, and more often than not, they presuppose what they should see anyway.

"Your French. . " he said as he turned back to the front, ". . it is very good." An inflection in his voice, just a hint there at the end of the word, suggesting a question.

"Thank you." I swallowed, pushing down the knot forming in my throat. In the past, my French had been serviceable; now, it was much better, but then I wasn't relying on my experiences alone. The Chorus twisted in my chest, a memory of old snakes, and from their coils, I heard the rising echo of their voice-the susurrating echo of many pretending to be one. I had always absorbed language quickly from the Chorus, but this time the connection was different, and my fluency was nearly perfect.

The customs agent nodded, his attention on my passport picture, and I realized he was waiting for me to elaborate. We had used the picture from my old passport as well, instead of playing games with image manipulation. My hair was shorter now, and lighter. Looking at the picture, I could see how haunted I had been: the stain of the Qliphoth in the flesh below my eyes, the distant stare, the slack skin of my face, the shadows at the base of my throat. I looked like a man worn out before his time, and the only distinguishing feature-the one detail that made the rest irrelevant-was the white band of hair. A narrow braid of fine hair ran around my throat. A gift from Reija, my Finnish witch. A reminder of what I had both lost and gained with the Chorus.

Piotr had vouched for the forger. A Five of Disks man. Reliable. Very competent. There was nothing to worry about. This is one man's curiosity. Nothing more. Keep the lie simple. Make it true.

"My mother's uncle lived along the Aude," I explained. The lie came easily-much like my new fluency with the language-as if it was true. As if I believed it. "We used to visit every year when I was younger." The Chorus coalesced into a stream of images: the farm house, its brick chimney leaning toward the east; the wooden railing of the horse pasture fence; the trees along the slow water. It wasn't my past, but the memory was mine now, part of the mental travelogue of my life.

There, in my head, the image of a dark-haired girl, chasing white geese across the pale field. Yellow flowers, early to bloom. Spring at the farm.

"But not recently," the customs agent said. His gaze flickered toward his computer screen.

"No," I said carefully. "I've been. . traveling elsewhere."

He gave no indication he had heard my emphasis, and for a moment, I felt like a fool for trying such a trick. They weren't watching. Not this way.

A few months ago, when I had been interrogated in Seattle by the local Watcher, Lt. Pender of the Metropolitan Division of the SPD, he had pulled an extensive list of countries I had visited from TSA. It hadn't even occurred to me until a few days later that if Pender could pull that data so quickly, who was to say that other members of La Societe Lumineuse weren't equally able to query this data? I had been careful to stay hidden on a magickal level, but I had been trusting to security through obscurity-stay off the watch lists, give the security agencies no reason to notice me, and trust that the avalanche of data could never be properly mined to track me.

Even with the reassurance in my head from the Chorus that they weren't Watching this way, even with the added obscuration of the fake passport, I couldn't help that momentary spasm of panic that I was being a fool for coming back to Paris. That I was doing exactly what someone wanted me to do.

You are, a spirit in the Chorus whispered, and the rest of them turned the hiss of these two words into echoing laughter.

"Just the one bag?" the agent asked, oblivious to the tension knotting up my spine.

I nodded.

The agent's gaze flickered toward the line of waiting passengers behind me. "Most don't travel lightly," he said. "Lots of baggage."

I forced my heart to slow down. I exhaled slowly through my nose, pulling a Kundalini warmth up from my belly, up through the tension in my spine, up to my throat and face where it could lift the corners of my mouth. "I travel a lot," I said, the words falling through the warmth in my throat. "I learned the lesson some time ago: travel light; you never need as much baggage as you think you do." Each word came easier, drawing the tension out of my body. Growing lighter with each letter, shedding the weight of old paranoia. It was still so easy to be bound by that old way of thinking, that bleak fury that had driven me for so long, that restless need for revenge. In the dim chambers of my heart, it was easy to welcome back that old animal instinct. "Besides, the airlines charge now for extra weight. I tell you, they're getting cheaper all the time. Soon they'll be weighing us when we board. . "

The customs agent nodded, no longer listening to me, as he tapped a few keys. "Welcome to Paris, M. Dupont," he said as he slid my passport across the counter. "Have a nice visit."

I took the folio. "Thank you," I said, making a small show of being annoyed that he had cut me off. Something to give him the satisfaction of having controlled the conversation. Something to make me seem smaller. As I walked past him, he had already waved the next person forward. With each step, I was vanishing from his mind.

They aren't Watching.

I walked toward the arch that separated the security area from the main terminal. De Gaulle was a series of pods, built years before modern security theater, and even after every attempt to turn it into a series of dehumanizing little boxes, it still evoked the interior of a gothic cathedral. The new arch was a faux wall, built from pressed wood products and molded plastic, and it certainly didn't have the grandeur of any of the arches of Notre-Dame. But it had its own magic: by virtue of its shape and design, it was a threshold; a portal between here and there, one magickal space and another. Arches, doors, entryways, thresholds: they were all symbols of change. Once I crossed it, I would be in a different world.

I would be back in France.

I had caught an earlier flight than the one that had been provided for me. The direct flight was too obvious, and I couldn't believe that someone wouldn't have been Watching there. Especially when my real name had been on the ticket. I had gone out to Sea-Tac much earlier in the day and had talked my way on to standby for the less direct flight. At the last minute, the gate attendant released a first class seat. I had feigned surprise and eagerly paid full price for the ticket. The airline had been happy to gouge me.

The flight went through Heathrow, where I had sat for several hours in the British Airways lounge and tried not to think about my final destination. Or the phone call I wasn't making. Excuses were plentiful: it was an international call; I didn't have a cell phone; she might not be home; what was the point of leaving a message. After all this time? Hi, it's Michael; I'm not as dead as you thought.

Baggage. Lots of baggage. Physically, I had grown accustomed to traveling light, but, in my head, I was standing at the curb, waiting for a Sky Cap and a cart. The rapture in Portland had graced me with a new burden-a different sort of baggage-and not all of my old mistakes had been forgiven. Sins may be absolved, but the stains left behind were another matter entirely.

The Chorus flushed through the braid of white hair around my throat, leaving-in their wake-a tingling sensation that flowed down into my chest like a film of water racing across glass. An involuntary shiver followed, a purely physical reaction to the mystic flow. I still wasn't accustomed to this new freedom they enjoyed, this new independence from my Will. Certainly less of the malignant taint that had been eating at my spirit for the last decade, and there was a constant hum to them now, as if they were some sort of autonomous holistic system, keyed to maintaining my shell.

Too much like a guardian angel for my liking.

Then there was the issue with the Old Man. Maybe he was too strong of a spark to be subsumed quickly. Maybe the process of mapping history to mine was slower with the new Chorus. They weren't as ravenous as the last bunch, and it had only been twenty-four hours since Philippe and I had met in Seattle. In Harvey Alleningham's library, where we had talked. Father to son. Teacher to student. Magus to magus.

Less than a day had passed since we had had our talk, and I had taken his soul.

Staring at the arch that separated Customs from the main airport, I was reminded of Aleister Crowley's commentary on the Moon, the nineteenth card of the Major Arcana of the tarot. Well, the Moon was never far from my mind these days. Not since Portland. Not since Devorah nearly cut my throat with it.

On the Moon card, there is a void between the pillars, a threshold between the two paths represented by the pillars. A bloodied moon hangs low in the sky. The card represented the cusp of possibility. The Moon was the edge of midnight. On this side of its pillars, you were still in the real world, on the other side was both dream and nightmare. Unrealized until you stepped across. Until you actualized the future.

You See it, Michael, it becomes so; that is the key to the ego of the Moon.

While in the lounge at Heathrow, I had looked at the deck I had brought with me, and the Moon had been warm, the ink seemingly still wet on the card. Unlike Crowley's symbolic explosion, the Marseille Moon was like a surrealist landscape painting, a flat illustration of disparate objects: the pillars, the dogs, the rays thrusting forth from the lunar disk, the crab in the river, the moon itself. But it was a syncretic whole, all the objects to be treated equally, and not read solely as a representation of the swollen eye of midnight. The meaning of the pillars and the space between them was but a piece of the puzzle, as were the tears falling from the gibbous eye and the crab reaching up for them.

You could hold yourself on this threshold, balanced on this moment of possibility. You could live your life here, never crossing over, but it was a life in abeyance. A life never fully realized. You had to cross the threshold. You had to move forward and pass between the pillars. You had to decipher the mysteries offered by your existence, otherwise the river would-eventually-wash you away.

I had to unlock the puzzle in my head. I had to know why the Chorus came back. I had to know what Philippe gave me when I took him. There were too many pieces still unknown. Too many strands of the mystic knot in my head that I couldn't follow.

I had to cross the threshold into the future.

A fellow passenger, clearly under no apprehension about arches, strode past, clipping my foot with the edge of her suitcase. Don't be a rock in the stream, the Chorus whispered, and I knew they were right. Time to move on. I took a deep breath, held it, and walked through the arch.

I don't know what I expected: lights and sirens; a bolt of lightning from Heaven; a demonic army bursting through the floor. Like most transitions we go through in life, there was no sign the Universe carried or noticed. Nothing happened. The lights didn't even flicker. I took a step to the side, hauling my suitcase out of the way, and watched as other passengers moved past me. Souls, moving from one realm to another. Thousands did it every day. It was just another portal. Part of the endless cycle of our lives. We pass through portals and don't realize-or don't care-that nothing-or everything-has changed. We pass through, and go on.

"Paranoia," I whispered to myself. "Looking too hard to find connections." In the last six months, I had started talking to myself. It was the only way I could be sure the voice was mine and not theirs. The first few times I had been furtive about it, as if I were hiding something, but from who? The voices in my head? I could imagine Detective Nicols making a note in his little black book: Schizophrenia. How many symptoms is he exhibiting now?

The Chorus read the terminal, overlaying my vision with the glittering silver of etheric energy. A sea of dancing lights, filled with currents and eddies, this magickal overlay was a visual filter that transformed the terminal into a fluid map. Allowing the Chorus to enhance my vision was becoming an unconscious reflex; prior to Portland, this had been an act of Will, and now it was merely an aspect of evaluating the environment. I could read the leys more easily now; I could see the patterns of force that affected the world and those caught in its rhythms. I could see the lights without having to worry about my own; the Chorus was no longer a constant threat, waiting for me to weaken, waiting for their chance to take over my body.

The souls in the terminal were like a profusion of stars in the night sky: some were bigger, some brighter, some twinkled. One appeared to be strong enough to exert a subtle influence on the souls around it. The Chorus reached for this light, but I held them back, flushing them from my vision. I wanted to see who this was without the benefit of mystic sight, as there was something about its resonance that was achingly familiar. Something about its pulse that seemed so close to my own.

At the farm house, along the Aude. The memory of the little dark-haired girl, chasing the geese. One of Philippe's memories. I hadn't known her then. But as the Chorus left my eyes, and I saw her standing by the wall, the memory of the little girl became fused with my history of the child as a grown woman.

She was standing near a wall of burnished steel, out of the flow of traffic. Her hair was shorter and straighter, a sculpted salon cut that seemed like a frozen arc of water. Highlights too, honey and gold. A black overcoat, tailored tightly to the curve of her body. Underneath she wore a burgundy silk top, scoop neck to highlight the cluster of stones held at the base of her throat by a silver cord. The sight of her, as always, made me feel like a scruffy vagrant caught dumpster diving behind the sleaziest bar in town. A tongue-tied, clumsy, lovesick vagrant who wanted nothing more than to find a bouquet of roses in the trash.

Marielle.

She was waiting for someone, her gaze moving from face to face as more passengers streamed through the gate. She had seen me when I had first come out, but she hadn't recognized me. But I was standing still now, staring at her; feeling my gaze, she gave me another look.

Her pulse jumped and the Chorus sparked in syncopation, and recovering, noted another spike elsewhere.

She wasn't the only one waiting.

On my left, further back in the terminal, the Chorus targeted a magus trying to be invisible. He was wearing sunglasses and a black coat with a gray sweatshirt underneath. Hardly inconspicuous in this day and age, but he was using magick to bend light. Most of the people in the terminal wouldn't register him as being there, but to those of us with extra-sensory perceptions, he wasn't that clever.

Before I could examine him more closely, the Chorus tagged another cluster of lights-a more active threat. Three magi, coming from my left, walking through the terminal, checking all the gates. The Chorus touched the trio before I could prevent them, and having licked their lights, the spirits knew who the three men were.

What I know, I pass to you. What you know, passes to me. Father. Son. Holy Spirit. Let these secrets be revealed.

Jerome Theirault, third-degree Traveler. Tall and lanky, he looked awkward in his winter coat as if he were nothing but sticks and birds' nests underneath. Charles Lentier, sixth-degree Traveler. Florid, trending toward round; face shaped like a pug dog's. He knew he would never make another grade, and his bitterness and resignation was imprinted deeply on his face. And Henri Vaschax. First-degree Viator. One of a pair. He limped.

I knew why Henri limped. The Chorus twisted around the memory of that night in Bechenaux.

Henri wouldn't have forgotten either.

I maneuvered through the flow of bodies in the terminal, heading for Marielle. "They're on the prowl," I said as I reached her. "They shouldn't be here." So much for the cordial opening. Hi. How've you been? I've missed-

"No," she said. Her gaze was magnetic and I couldn't look away for a second. "Neither should you." Nothing accusatory in her tone, but I could read it all in her eyes.

"I'll explain later. We need to go."

I touched her arm and the Chorus whined at the contact. She was a gravity well. Gravitas. It was as if she were standing on a nexus of ley energies, and they were grounding her. It would take more power than I had at my ready call to move her. "No," she said. "Not after all this time. Don't brush me off."

I glanced back at the trio of Watchers, and the Chorus could taste the etheric disturbance forming around Henri's head. Viator, I thought. One who has returned from Traveling; a walker between worlds. Seven steps removed from Protector. Enough of a magus to flatten me, given the chance.

Since I had left Paris, I'd been scatter-shot in my education, learning what I could, when I could. I hadn't been keeping up with the ritualized procession of the degrees within the society. If pressed, I could probably pass the Traveler trial without much preparation. But Viator? Not a chance. Which put Henri way outside my comfort zone. I didn't want to have to face him. Not here. Not now.

"Your father isn't on this flight," I said to Marielle, rushing past the truth and into the lie. "He's on a later flight. He gave up his seat to me." And before she could ask, I pushed on, compounding the falsehood with some more truth. "He came to see me. In Seattle. Asked me to come back to Paris. But there are some-" My tongue caught on the word. "-circumstances that forced him to stay behind."

"Why?" she asked. Her eyebrows pulled together as she looked past my shoulder, at the three magi approaching.

Not here. Not now.

And then I knew how to unroot her. "They've exposed themselves," I said. "That's why he sent me first. To draw them out. Now we know who they are."

"But-" she started.

"Markham," Henri Whispered. That line-of-sight magick trick whereby magi spoke directly to one another.

Too late.

"Henri Vaschax," I said, turning to greet the three men. The fabric of Marielle's coat brushed my hand; my suitcase rocked on its wheels, but remained upright. "It's been a while." The Chorus twisted in my throat, some of their old humor lacing my words. "How's the knee?"

Nunc, the Chorus breathed, echoing a ritual moment two months ago. A whisper of a dry wind, twisting through old bones. Waking old ghosts, beginning the cycle anew.

This is how it begins.