Lightbreaker

XII

This looks suspiciously like vagrancy." A voice forced itself into my head. "Or public drunkenness."

I came back to the world of the flesh, struggling to find myself. On my back, face turned toward a star-dappled sky, arms crooked like the wings of a dead albatross. Prickly heat filled my legs, making my ankles and feet ache.

Pender, on my right, wrapped in his long coat. His hands were in his pockets, and his jaw moved precisely around a piece of gum. He looked fresh-pressed and steamed. When he saw that I recognized him, he nudged me with a foot. "Lying about like this," he said. "It's more than a little sloppy. How much have you had to drink tonight, Markham?"

My mouth didn't work; all I could manage was a series of blinks and twitches. He bent down, examining the awkward movement of my face. "Having a seizure?" he asked. "Some ancient LSD payload finally detonating, or has some old curse foisted on you by a weekend witch finally taken root?"

I twisted my head to the side, and spat out a glob of black pitch. Pender wrinkled his nose at the bubble-flecked material from my lungs. "Hate," I croaked. "I'm full up."

"For whom? Your little renegade spirit Doug?" He shook his head. "You aren't interested in him. You want someone else. Doug's just a means to an end, isn't he?"

I swallowed more of the blackness, sending it back into the pit of my unruly stomach. "He's my link."

"I could be your link," he said. "Maybe you're asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. Maybe you're trying too hard to find something that isn't lost."

"Maybe you don't know what you're talking about." Pender stepped back as I levered myself to a sitting position.

He pulled a Polaroid out of his pocket and tossed it in my lap. "Maybe I do." It was a picture of Kat.

Her face had become thinner over the last decade and her hair was shorter, though still streaked with red highlights. It wasn't a face that would launch a thousand ships, but it had filled my dreams-filled my head and consumed everything. Seeing a fresh image of her face, I realized how easy it had been for Paris of Troy to descend into obsessive madness, to fixate on abducting Helen from Sparta as the solution to his brain fever. Yes, yes, this is the best solution. The simple path is the correct path. Covering the picture with a cold hand, I tried to put Kat out of my mind; I tried so very hard to quit the past.

"Settle it," he said. "This is a one-time offer."

An involuntary whimper escaped my lips. My insides streaked with black lightning, a volcano erupting in that pit from where the Chorus grew. Yes. Take back what is yours. Close enough.

Pender watched me for a few seconds, a smirk pulling at his lips, before he walked away. His car was parked on the far side of the empty lot, and as he opened the door, the interior light flicked on. Before the door shut, I caught a flash of movement in the receding shadows of the back seat. The Chorus still raged within me, still thrust themselves against my Will, but I squeezed them into a knot. Squeezed hard, and focused. As the vehicle left the lot, I strained to part the shadows in the back seat.

He wasn't alone. There was someone else in the car.

"Who was that?" Nicols stood in the doorway of the trailer. "Pender?"

I slumped, barely able to shake my head.

"He just left you here?" He walked toward me.

Shivering, I offered him the Polaroid. I still couldn't speak.

I didn't have to. He looked at the picture for a long time. "This her?" he asked finally. He flipped the picture over. "There's something on the back. 'Scarlet Woman plus Hidden Light equals Beast.' And there are some numbers underneath: 393 + 273 = 605." He paused, doing the math. "That's not right, 393 and 273 add up to 666."

"Six-six-six is the number of the beast," I groaned, the Chorus finally letting go of my voice. "Six-oh-five is the number of my hotel room at the Monaco." The difference was 61. Another message: 61 was Ain-the Abyss, the cold darkness where the Qliphoth thrived.

"The picture was taken in my hotel room."

Nicols flipped the Polaroid over again to re-examine the portrait. "She's there?"

"She's waiting for me."

Settle it, the Chorus oozed, dripping poison in my ear. I was caught between terror and desire, shivering with the promise of their commingling. Take it back. My lost soul, my lost heart. The Lovers, hands on hearts and heads, energy flowing back and forth in an endless loop, mixing themselves together. This is the way to heal yourself. Make you whole again.

One path, one direction. Through darkness into light. This was the way promised me.

Were the Qliphoth capable of keeping promises? Was the flesh capable of not betraying itself? Was the Word still true if it came from a false Godhead?

God created the Demiurge who, in turn, created the World. God was the Word, and He gave it to the Creator to speak it. And, having made the World, the Demiurge forgot who gave him the power to Create.

Was my world a lie? The history I remembered-so fractured with dark light-was it a fabrication? Made solely to provide framework for the insistent noise of the Chorus? As I had gotten closer to Kat, they had become more frenzied, more inflamed by. . what? A desire for revenge?

But was it deserved? Was it true? There were cracks in their rationale, joints that didn't quite fit. As if the history they purported to be true was actually bolted together-some Frank-ensteinian construct that wasn't entirely. . me. Beneath them, providing direction and intent, was something else. Some other version of reality undimmed by these false memories.

There was only one way to find out. I held out my hand and Nicols, thinking I wanted the picture back, put it into my hand. I shook my head. "I need your car keys."

"I don't think this is a good idea," he replied.

"I don't care what you think."

"You're not rational, Markham. Your obsession with this woman is screwing with your judgment." He gestured toward Piotr's trailer. "I saw you in there. Hell, I saw what happened when you got close to a memory of her at the barn. Your head is all fucked up about this woman, about what you think happened, and it is going to get someone killed."

I got to my feet. "Her?"

"You," he said.

The Chorus churned, finding cause for violence in Nicols' inference. I made to bind them, and they responded by compressing into a lodestone in my chest. A magnetic attraction pulled at me, tugging me south and east. I looked along that axis-straight across the Interbay, right through the whirling globe atop the Seattle Post-Intelligencer building, through Belltown and the curve of the Performance Center-and I could see the phantom shape of my hotel. The Chorus pulsed, and this magnetic line of desire stretched tight between Kat and me. They wanted release. From this conversation, from this damp parking lot. They wanted to run like dogs who had found the scent of their prey.

"Why would Pender give you what you want?" Nicols asked. "What does he gain by doing that?"

"What are you talking about?" The humming sound of the magnetic connection was making it hard to think.

"You said it yourself: they're schemers. The Watchers shape events by influence and manipulation. Do you think this situation is any different?"

I fought the pull in my chest, clinging like a drowning man to Nicols' words. Yes, and the reading Piotr had just thrown. The Eight of Swords had been my foundation. They were the roots entangling me. Interference. Obstructions raised by other forces and other agents who would attempt to distract me from my goal. Perhaps the detective himself is such a distraction, the Chorus whispered. You have her. You've been given permission.

Take it.

I shook my head, shaking off their voices more than denying the truth to Nicols' question. "You think I'm going to kill her."

"Yeah, the thought crossed my mind. Has more than once. I don't think you're stable, Markham; I think there is some serious damage in your brain. But here's the thing-and you should listen to this because I know what the fuck I'm talking about-killing Kat isn't going to fix what's wrong in you."

I held out a hand for the keys. "You don't know anything about me." A black bubble rose in my throat.

"Christ!" he exploded. "You think you're the only one who's had his heart broken?"

"It's not like that."

"No? Because you're certainly acting the part. I've been cleaning up after people for twenty years. When lovers get jealous or angry, when families self-destruct, when people just get stupid: I'm there. I'm the guy who has to see the aftermath; I have to tell parents that someone-a lover, a friend, a sibling-someone just took their baby away from them. You don't think a day doesn't go by when I hear some pathetic fuck whining about how this bitch just broke his heart and so he gave her what she deserved? 'She sucked off the mailman and so I put a gun in her mouth and blew her head off.' "

I flinched, and Nicols jabbed a thick finger at me. "Yeah, last week. That was some gang-banger's entire rationale: she deserved it. Three days later, the guy is screaming in his cell, yelling for his dead girlfriend because he's finally realized what an enormous mistake he's made. I can't help him. He's confessed, the evidence has been processed, and the DA has already cut a deal with the nickel-rate public defender assigned to the case. Guy's going to Walla Walla for ten to fifteen. You think that's going to fix the hole in his heart? You think that's going to bring her back?"

The Chorus whined, and I moaned aloud in concert. My legs twitched like a dog's who could see the open fields but knew there was an invisible fence, a radio frequency barrier that would trigger his electric collar if he strayed too far.

"Pender's got nothing on you," Nicols said. "Nothing that will hold up in court. You kill Kat, and he'll have you for murder one. Don't think he's not going to be watching. He'll let you do it-there's no doubt in my mind about that. But as soon as her heart stops beating, he's going to climb so far up your ass that he'll know what you're having for lunch the moment you swallow."

The Chorus slavered, and with an immense effort, I bent them back, driving them away from the febrile edge of my consciousness. My teeth chattered as I tried to speak, my words coming out in fragmented chunks. I closed my outstretched hand, digging fingernails into my palm, and tried again. "I'm lost," I croaked. "Ever since she touched me. I fell onto the Qliphotic path and I don't know how to return, John."

"Which path?" He didn't know the word; he was a child, after all, a wide-eyed innocent snatched from the Garden and abandoned in the shifting magickal reality. He didn't know about the Tree and the pathways, about the dark hole through Daath and the nightside of the Sephiroth. He didn't know what happens to those who fall.

"I need to find her. She's the key, John; she's my way back."

"How?" he asked. "How is she going to help you?"

The Chorus smiled behind my teeth, black daggers hidden by white enamel. "I need to ask her what really happened. I need to know, John. I need closure."

He looked toward the ambient glow of downtown Seattle. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Don't we all?" He put his hand in his coat pocket. "Okay, this is wrong. I just want that to be clear. I think this is a bad idea." I could hear his hand opening and closing around his keys. "I'll drive."

"Thank you."

He shook his head as if to dislodge my words from his shoulders, like leaves brushed off. "Don't thank me yet," he said. "If you raise a hand at her, I will pistol whip you myself."

The foyer around the elevator bay was extended by a niche cut out of the wall opposite. A large mirror and a mahogany George III sofa table, round across the front and topped with a tiny swatch of fabric and a vase of silk flowers, filled the space. The hallway ran both left and right, making right angle turns just beyond the pair of unmarked doors that flanked the foyer niche. Laid out like a square, the halls ran the length of the hotel and then right-angled again to meet on the far side of the floor. My room was halfway down the left hallway. Opposite the turn was the emergency exit, tucked back next to the elevator shaft.

I made it to the right angle, Nicols trailing behind me, when I felt a burn of magick. I turned, rotating the Chorus off my left wrist-a peacock fan of iridescent defense. I tried to shove past Nicols, pushing him toward the indentation of the stairwell door.

The spell pounded me against the wall, the shockwave billowing along the sheetrock, making the sconces flicker and the paint blister. Sound became watery-blood in the ear canal. Gritty steam obscured the hall, and my teeth ached with the taste of tinfoil.

Nicols was on his knees, leaning against the emergency exit door. He rolled over, a grimace of pain knotting his face, as he got his back to the door. He fumbled for his gun and got one shot off, before the twin darts of a Taser gun struck him. I heard-distantly, like the chatter of a flywheel-the Taser discharge, and all the fight went out of Nicols.

There were three of them, outlined in the fog by the Chorus. The bright one in the back was the magus from the farmhouse. I recognized the glittering cascade of his spirit.

I crawled down the hallway. Another Taser coughed, and the plastic darts rattled thinly against the wall behind me. I graduated to scrambling like a dog as the three men breached the forward edge of the fog.

My room-605-was two doors down, and I didn't even bother with the electronic key. I just smashed my hand through the plate assembly with a wedge of the Chorus and shoved the door open. As I ducked into the room, I saw three more men round the far corner of the hallway in front of me.

Surrounded. No way out but through my room. Past Kat.

Who wasn't there.

The lights were off and, even when the Chorus amplified the ambient light leaking around the curtains, it didn't make any difference. I was alone in the hotel room.

I could smell her. Lilacs. She had been here. Recently. The Chorus exploded in my heart, daggering into the nerve clusters of my spine, blowing themselves into the chambers of my brain. My bones felt like they were cracking as the Chorus convulsed within me, reacting to her proximity. My vision went blank, Qliphotic darkness eating through my brain. I was erupting, detonating the psychic payload I had been carrying these last ten years.

Katarina. Her hand in my chest, squeezing my heart, breaking my light. Katarina, a tiny part of me wept, this is all I have. This is all I am.

Who am I if it is all untrue?

At my back, the magus hurled a javelin of soul fire. The Chorus-raging and exploding through me-caught the missile, chewed it up, and spat it back at him. What had been a single thrust of soul-charged energy was returned as a hailstorm of black needles. My Qliphotic Chorus drove him across the hallway, and I pinned his soul to the wall in a thousand places.

His panic was a wet spray in my head, screaming on multiple layers of perception. "Shoot him! Shoot the son of a bitch already!" Luminescent tears bled from his eyes.

I didn't even feel the first Taser, didn't even react to the discharge of the weapon's voltage. The second pair of darts managed to break the Chorus' concentration. The third pierced the armor of darkness wrapped around my chest and lit my lungs on fire. The fourth turned the world white-fiat lux-and I shattered, fragmenting into minute shards of glittering glass, like a disintegrating prism.

This is all I am.

All I ever was, falling.