Lightbreaker

From a window seat at Denny's, I watched the firefighters contain the warehouse blaze. Julian's building was an unassuming four-story brick structure with plain windows evenly spaced about the facade. A series of loading docks ran off the southern side, with tall doors of corrugated metal large enough to accommodate easy loading of shipping containers.

I had found the one used for my prison on the first floor. One of the fleeing Hollow Men had thought he would be safe inside.

SFD had three engines on-site, and snakes of white hose were strewn about the red trucks. Lines of steaming water soaked the old bricks of the warehouse, playing a game of tag with the red and orange flame in the shattered windows. Yellow-suited figures ran along the raised concrete dock like ants trying to salvage their queen from the inferno inside.

"Looks like a good-sized fire." The waitress had a double order of sausage and cheese omelets, toast, and home fries. She put the plates down, one of them at the place setting across from me as if someone else was going to join me. I didn't bother to correct her assumption. I was going to wolf down the first plate in short order. The second one wasn't going to have time to cool. "Ketchup?" she asked.

I shook my head, and with a final glance toward the fire, she wandered off. I focused on the omelet in front of me. While I was filled with etheric energy, taken from the Hollow Men, it wasn't the same as real food. The material body needs material fuel-one of the inescapable rules of the Universe-and it had been four days since I had eaten. The waffle at Minnie's, early Wednesday morning.

The newspaper in the rack outside the restaurant said it was Saturday. The fire had cut through the morning fog blanketing the industrial district south of downtown Seattle, an early morning glow that must have confused drivers on I-5 as if the sun was rising in the west instead of the east. A single fire engine had responded initially but, after a rapid assessment, the on-site commander had called for backup. The fire was in the walls and floors.

The Arena had been in a subbasement, several floors below the ground. The conflagration had started there, with the immolation of the first Hollow Man. There were those who had just watched-Witnesses, not participants-and I had let them go. The others, the eight who had given Doug magickal aid, they had been my prey.

Four died in the subbasement; one in the eastern stairwell; one hid in the shipping container, and I had closed the door a moment before I set off Julian's ward; one tried to fight back, thinking he could ambush me on the second floor; and the last one tried to fly away. Filled with energy stolen from the others, I had given him a boost. He turned into ash, a black smear across the damp rooftop.

You have to fill the void.

It had been easy. A bright burning fury encapsulating a decade of pent-up helplessness. Years of fear. All focused through a need for vengeance, to take from them what they had taken from Kat.

The void in my soul. I poured energy into it because that was the way I reacted to a Universe that made me afraid. Its nihilistic enormity. What were we in this vast emptiness? I killed, not because of the Qliphotic taint, but because it was the only way I knew how to be a Creator.

"Nice of you to order me something."

Nicols sat down across from me. He turned over the nearby coffee cup and placed it near the edge of the table where the waitress would spot it. "There any ketchup?" he asked, unrolling the silverware from the paper napkin.

"I'm sure she can bring some," I said.

He did a good job of appearing to be noncommittal in looking at me, but I knew there were physical differences from the last time he had seen me. Unlike other scars, I had no desire to keep marks from the last few days. I had wiped away the pattern of burn marks on my chest, fixed the torn ligament in my knee and regrown my burned hair. The body is mutable if the Will is strong. The braid of Reija's hair was a stark white band about my throat. I had also acquired clothing before leaving the warehouse, replacing my blood-stained pants with a nondescript blue track suit I had found in a locker. Nicols noticed the reverse haircut, surely, just as he noticed how rested I looked compared to him.

The jeans and hooded sweatshirt augmented his exhaustion, failing to disguise the slump of his shoulders and the unhealthy tinge of his skin. The disheveled arrangement of his hair suggested he had been sleeping in his car. Smoking there too. His clothes reeked of musty tobacco.

He looked out the window at the fire, not unaware of the view afforded this table. "You're very shiny," he said. "I Saw you from the street." I heard his emphasis. In my absence, he had come to believe in his Sight.

And I was very shiny. Filled with the light of the Hollow Men, I knew I'd be hard not to spot from the street. I wasn't ready to flush all that energy; it was a ready reservoir of useful power. The increased visibility was a trade-off I could live with in the short term. Besides, all the wrong sort of people already knew I was here.

"You happen to be in the neighborhood or do you have a fetish for fire?" I asked, nodding toward the excitement down the block.

"Very funny. Thanks for hanging around at the hotel. I appreciate the concern for my well-being. It was just a Taser, after all. I suppose you get shot with that sort of thing every day."

"Not every day. I'm sorry about that. You were right. It was a trap. But not one of Pender's design."

"Yeah," he nodded. "I figured that out when he arrived. He was convinced you had orchestrated that mess: shot me, taken the girl, and made a run for the border."

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing. He was eager to have me corroborate his story." He shrugged. "So I did." He leaned forward. "I met your friend."

"Who?"

"Antoine."

He was here. My insight into the Weave had been correct. There was a larger game afoot, and we were being moved about in accordance with a coordinated plan. "So Pender's act was for his benefit."

"Yeah, that's what I figured. He was trying too hard to sell his story."

"Did Antoine buy it?"

Nicols settled back in the seat, exhaling noisily. "He's. . ah, 'inscrutable' is a good word. He's not fucking there when you try to look at him. And forget trying to read his body language. It's like trying to read patterns in running water. He knew I could See and the fact that I couldn't read him at all may have amused him. Or maybe not. I just don't know."

"Antoine was always good at hiding himself."

"He's more than good." Nicols shook his head. "Pender wanted to hold me for questioning. 'Observation' was the term he used. But Antoine-Jesus, he barely said anything and Pender was still ready to shit himself-wasn't going to have any of that. He told Pender to leave me alone."

I smiled. Nicely done. My abduction had been meant to be a distraction, but Antoine had simply brushed the misdirection aside. He left Nicols in play, knowing the detective would look for me.

"What about Kat?" he asked. "Did you find her?"

I looked at the fire, at the cloud of black smoke rising from the ruined warehouse, before I nodded.

The waitress wandered over with the coffee pot. She poured Nicols a cup, and while she refilled mine, he talked her out of the ketchup bottle in the pocket of her apron. He smothered his omelet and I looked away, my stomach churning. Too much like blood.

"Where is she?" He hacked off the end of his omelet, a clean slice done with an executioner's precision. Like a sword through a limb.

"I don't know." I hadn't found her body: not in the container, not in the interrogation room, not anywhere else in the building. Kat was gone, and a part of my heart told me-over and over-that she was already dead. She had been broken and the invasive darkness would devour her. Even if I had been able to find her immediately, how was I going to save her? I hadn't been able to save my own soul from a tear more imagined than real. What was I going to do for someone who was actually missing part of their soul? And now, three days on, how much could possibly be left? How much of Kat was left, and how much was turned into something else.

A Qliphotic echo looped behind those questions, a lingering remnant of the poison. It still sought to influence my Will, to lure me into that immolation of vengeance. That Mahapralaya moment. Find those who killed her. Do to them what you did to the nine. They all deserved to die. They all conspired to take her from you. Every one of them. Break their souls.

I stabbed my plate so hard the fork stuck into the porcelain. "I don't know." I looked out the window, and my exhalation left ice on the glass. Part of me repeated what the voices were saying; part still liked that empty and cold worldview.

Cancers linger. They never die quickly. Their hearts can be extracted, but their roots are persistent and they don't die overnight. The rot stops, but the decay can still be infectious. Days, weeks, months-years, even-would have to pass before it was truly gone.

"What happened?" Nicols prodded me, a gentle nudge to shake me loose from this cycle of endless recrimination. A simple question, seemingly innocent, but his eyes were hard and he didn't blink.

"I didn't hurt her, John. I found her and. . everything. . it was all wound around a lie. Some story I told myself so often that. . she wasn't responsible, John. She was just. . a symbol. Just something that reminded me of what I had lost."

He looked away, and not because of the nakedness of my confession, but because of his own reaction to my words. His own secret. What was it? I grabbed onto this question as a way to escape my own thoughts, and I pieced together the clues he had left me: his empty house, and the clothes still in the closet; his reference to on-going therapy sessions-started before the incident on the ferry; and his mannerisms, deliberate and yet hesitant-a corpus of non-verbal communication that had become a dead language now that the only person who had understood his gestures and affections was no longer here.

Sarah. He had referred to her in the past tense.

"I'm sorry, John," I said. "My issues aren't the same. Not at all."

His jaw paused. "Yeah," he said, putting his fork down. "They aren't."

A burst of cheap music trilled from the pouch of his sweatshirt. Nicols dug out his cell phone, looked at the display, and his eyebrows pulled together. He flipped it open and raised it tentatively to his ear. "Nicols."

The conversation was one-sided; his contribution was several noncommittal grunts. I tried to read something in his expression, some indication of what he was hearing. "Yes, Ma'am," he said. He shut the phone and a reaction to what he had just heard crystallized in his eyes: fear.

"That was my captain. I've been recalled to active duty. I'm supposed to report to a suburb called Ravensdale immediately."

"What's going on?"

He shook his head. "She wouldn't tell me. But she did say that the call is going out to everyone. We're all being sent, every cop the city can spare. Something has happened."

Bernard. The theurgic mirror.

In my heart, there was a spurt of fire. Break their souls.

On the Thomas Guide map, Ravensdale was a tiny community off Kent-Kangley Road, tucked away on the eastern side of the ridge from the larger suburb of Kent. What the map failed to show was how the cone of Mt. Rainier dominated the horizon this far from the urban center of Seattle, a mottled white and gray peak towering over the surrounding bumps of the Cascade Range. The aftermath of Tuesday's storm had fled the valley, leaving only a thin layer of clouds gliding across the pale sky.

A piebald blanket of pine trees blanketed the foothills of the mountains. The verdant growth of trees was broken in irregular intervals by construction. Persistent urban encroachment. The escalation of property values in Seattle proper continued to push people further and further away. As we drove out Maple Valley Highway, Nicols pointed out the creeping edge of the frontier: first Newcastle and Kent, then Maple Valley and Covington, now Ravensdale.

When we reached the police roadblock, we queued up behind three other cars. King County Sheriff's deputies gathered around each vehicle as it rolled up to their four-car barricade. I rolled down the window as we crept forward, listening to the wind and the sounds from the forest. Both were hushed, as if afraid to be the ones to tell me what had happened here.

One of the three cars in the queue was turned away. Two guys-radiating annoyance and anger-glared at us as they rolled past. As if we were somehow responsible for denying them access. Nicols' casual wave didn't improve their mood. "Erickson and Stenhill. From the Times," he explained. "I've never seen them in anything but a foul mood."

When it was our turn, Nicols offered his shield and ID. The young man at his window seemed too young to have been on the force long-first or second year, probably; the Chorus could taste him. He read the details on Nicols' ID carefully, comparing image to face, and then he leaned down further and looked over at me. "Who's this?"

"He's with me," Nicols said.

"I need to log him," the deputy replied.

Two of them spread out on my side of the car, their hands firmly on their pistol butts. The Chorus heard their heartbeats, and showed me silver adrenaline spikes running across their shoulders.

My hands shook as the spectral ghosts moved in my spine. They were so eager, and I realized how unhinged I still was from the expulsion of the poison and the subsequent fight in the Arena. My control was marginal, my own desire for violence too close to the surface. I was too ready to listen to them. Too ready to burn.

"Name's Markham," Nicols said, unaware of my mental struggle. He carefully spelled my last name for the cop. "Special attache to SPD from back east. He's trained for this sort of thing."

A flutter of pale fabric moved in the shadow of the trees along the road. The fourth deputy-the one who remained near their cars-shouted, pointing out the movement. Struggling to pull their guns, the pair on my side spun around. They missed the convulsive shudder that ran through my body as I let the Chorus out, as I let them touch the approaching figure.

An old man scrambled out of the woods, scuttling on all fours like a rabid squirrel. Dressed in flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt so old it had turned gray, he was a strange apparition wildly out of place in the context of the woods. Gnarled and distorted, his face was a melted wax mold. His eyes were gone, black holes in his pinched face and his tongue was a shriveled stick in his mouth. Dark motes drifted from his sagging mouth, a haze of ash.

Before the deputies could decide to fire, the old man scrabbled onto the road, and rammed my passenger-side door with his head. His hands clawed for the open window.

I grabbed his head, evading the snapping trap of his mouth, and the Chorus, wreathing my body like a phantasmal film of silver smoke, collapsed into the point of contact between my flesh and the man's dead skin. With an infernal roar like an industrial boiler lighting, the old man's body ignited. Light into darkness, a sacrament that was anathema to the debasement violating the old man. Qliphotic. Soul dead. A piece of flash paper, he vanished into a greasy smear of smoke, and in a second, there was nothing left but a tiny stain of soot on the road.

Nicols retrieved his badge and ID from the astonished deputy. "Like I said, a professional." He eased the car forward and gently rolled us through the narrow gap between the police cars. As we picked up speed beyond the barricade, I looked back. The one who had spotted the old man first was talking into his radio while the others stared, dumbfounded, at the smear on the road.

"Drive faster," I told Nicols. "He's calling us in. He's got my name."

"What the hell was that?" Nicols' calm facade cracked.

I noticed what was strewn across the back seat of the car. The blanket covering most of it had slipped down. Two file boxes filled with papers and books, and it looked like more books on the floor. Unlike the collection on Doug's shelves, this assortment was a better primer. Nicols had been busy.

"Qliphotic zombie," I explained. "When the soul is gone, all that remains is a hunger. They're drawn to bright lights. Vacuums fill."

He nodded. My examination of his library hadn't gone unnoticed. "Yeah," he said, jerking his head at the books. "It all started with a vacuum. Ain Soph collapses into Ain. I got that far in one of the Kabbalah books back there. But where did this zombie come from?"

"Ravensdale." I heard Bernard's voice in my head. We have a much grander plan in mind. "Yeah," I said, answering his unasked question. "There's going to be more of them." The Chorus quailed at my imagination, sending a line of fear running down my spine. "He's taken them all," I croaked. "Every soul in Ravensdale."

As I said it, as I voiced the terrible enormity of what might have happened, I realized why the old man had charged the car. Wrapped with energy stolen from the nine at the warehouse, I was the brightest light in the valley. A psychic magnet, a lodestone for every empty shell within several miles, and I was heading for ground zero.