Lightbreaker

III

That stunt got me a free ride in a police cruiser, wrists cuffed savagely behind my back. The back seat stank of stale bodies, but the scent of fear pooling in the car came from the pair of officers in the front. Rumors were already spreading, fantasy informing gossip. These two weren't sure what had happened and, as a result, their imaginations were feeding all the wild stories.

All it takes is a seed.

We entered police headquarters in downtown Seattle through an unmarked entrance in the back, spiraling down fluorescently lit passages of white stone into the sub-levels beneath the street. I was hustled through equally unadorned hallways to a tiny room with two plastic chairs and a cheap metal table. A steel ring was welded to the top of the table.

My jacket and the contents of my pockets had been taken from me at the ferry terminal and, after we entered the interrogation room, they took my belt and shoelaces. A young officer tried for the thin braid of hair about my throat, and the Chorus nipped at him. Trying to keep his cool, he pulled back and made a half-hearted dismissive gesture. Something to hide the tremor in his hands. No one offered to take a look at the bloody nick along my side. The fact that it had stopped bleeding was apparently good enough for them. After that, they locked one of the handcuffs to the metal ring and left me alone.

A history of desperate chain-smokers was an old stink permeating every surface-nearly a tactile crust on the room. The paint on the wall opposite the door was less dull than the other walls. An observation window once, perhaps, sheet-rocked over some time ago. The floor was a cheap parquet, an ugly color stained even uglier. The table and chairs were utilitarian: the table legs were welded to the pitted top, the chairs were the molded plastic sort found around the pool at two-star motels. The room didn't bother to obscure its purpose. Out of sight, out of mind. No one wanted to know what happened here.

I tried to get comfortable. The handcuffs and the ring meant I had to lean forward as if I were considering a session of earnest supplication but hadn't quite committed myself to the act. Easier to lie on the table with my hands resting above my head, wrists next to the metal ring.

I was tired. It had been nearly 3:00 a.m. when I had spotted Doug, and the resulting chase had been unexpected and draining. Prior to that, I had been out on the peninsula visiting an old friend.

Father Lenbier was a retired Naval Chaplain with a house outside of Lofall-an hour from the ferry terminal at Winslow. He had been stationed in the Far East for thirty years before being tossed back across the ocean for his final tour at the Naval Yard at Bremerton. I had been to both China and Japan, and I had wanted to catch up.

I had met the priest in Olso years ago-just two wanderers washed into a back-alley bar, looking to offset the permafrost of the dark winter. His faith provided an interesting counterpoint to the. . melancholy that had driven me north. A bottle of Laphroaig consecrated our friendship. It hadn't been my choice-he was the single malt fan-but, by the end of the night, I had learned a measure of respect.

We had spent the evening telling polite lies about our secret histories, and trying to deconstruct the nature of faith via the magic of a bottle of Dalwhinnie 15. The antique market in the Pacific Northwest looked to the East for its history (unlike the New England market which was perversely fixated on Louis XIV's bedroom furniture), and Father Lenbier's stories about the Far East station were filled with useful details. Grist for the small talk which invariably crept up in my business. One must keep up appearances on one's public persona.

Then, on the way home, there had been the deer, with Doug squatting on its spine. Like a guiding star half-glimpsed through a barrier of thick trees or a glimmer of bewitched swamp gas intended to lure the unwary, the animal with its spiritual possessor had drawn me away from the road and into the wilderness.

Chance plays a very small part in the Weave of the Universe. There are currents and eddies in the natural world that influence the mind, but very little of the Universe is driven by random luck. It is a matter of synchronicities, the seeming coincidences have a hidden connectivity. The Weave is the fabric of the World, and its threads are the convoluted tracks of every personal history.

For the last two weeks, I had been tracking Katarina. It had been ten years since we had seen each other-a decade that had done nothing to dull the ache in my chest. On the few previous occasions when her trail crossed mine, the threads had always been stiff and brittle-too old to follow without breaking them. This time, I knew she was still in Seattle. The trouble had been finding something more substantial than the persistent itch caused by her proximity.

The Chorus crystallized in my head, spinning memory. Doug's history. Hazy, but still of some use. Close enough. That scent, that familiar taste.

Kat had touched his soul. Last night, she had participated in a ritual of disengagement. I could taste her presence on him. She had directed the wedge used to drive apart flesh and spirit.

In my travels, I had learned many names for the same objects, the same rituals, the same beliefs. All the names carried with them a different history, a different mnemonic resonance. Kabbalist mystics would label her the unclean child of that harlot Lilith, a foul child who sucked energy from a vessel, allowing the Qliphoth to invade the empty shell. The modern Hungarian Gypsies-who split their time between modern apartments in Budapest and hand-built cabins in the mountains-named her "szuz ordog": demon maid, a succubus whose ill touch separated the light from the dark.

They taught me other names too. Names meant, not for her, but for me. Lelek rablo. Feny rombolo. Spirit thief. Lightbreaker.

Doug's contact with her hadn't been like mine. There was no fear on him-none of that panic that had overwhelmed me. Their interaction had been a ritual affair, a ceremonial act knowingly consecrated. In the last decade, Kat had learned new tricks and found new friends. They were using psychoanimist techniques: direct manipulation of the soul, spirit possession, and astral travel. New tricks, indeed.

In the last few weeks, I had discovered five groups who operated in the Greater Puget Sound area. One was a weekend wiccan gathering-housewives who sought to influence neighborhood politics and local weather patterns. Another was based out of an underground club in the Capitol Hill district, though it was more of a social organization held together by a mutual affection for rhythmic noise and power electronic music. The others were more rigidly structured-more of the sort that I was seeking, but they appeared to be traditional. Old rituals, older laws. Transgressive and experimental, they weren't. Kat's group, on the other hand, was probably a splinter, a secret cabal bored with the old rituals, who had gone off on their own. Very quietly, and very under the radar. Best to stay hidden in the sexually and morally repressed West, when you were practicing psychoanimism.

The muscles in my arms were jumpy, and the awkward position required by the handcuff ring wasn't making it any easier to relax. A pranayama breathing ritual would help oxygenate my blood and alleviate some of the exhaustion. Though, even with the tension release of the technique, my right knee was going to be stiff for some time.

An interrogator hadn't shown yet, leading me to believe they were going to let me sit awhile. I wasn't even sure if they were watching me. If a camera was hidden behind the ceiling tiles, it had escaped my notice. But there was no point in trying to ascertain if they were watching-there were things I could be doing with the downtime-internal things the camera couldn't see. I fell into the pranayama mantra, and my breathing found the rhythm quickly. The rest would come-the unwinding of my spine, the unlocking of my hips, the bleed-off of energy through my relaxed fingers. .

My mind drifted into the hazy realm of memory and premonition. I dozed, and the Chorus sighed, their voices fading to a tiny buzz of static. The physical world stretched into a transparent film over the surging grid of the urban energy flow. I stretched for the nearest conduit, and slipped into the vibrant ocean of etheric energy pulsating throughout the city.

A Hopi shaman had taught me how to read the geomantic grid of the world. We had spent a week exposed on a knob of bare rock high in the Arizona desert, drinking rainwater and eating peyote buttons. His body, black with pitch, was invisible to the moon, and he had drawn a pattern of stars on his face with orange and yellow paint. He wore a crown of eagle feathers and a necklace of mountain lion claws, and across his broad back he draped a ragged wolf pelt. After three days, when he stopped being a man, he showed me how to taste the earth, how to interpret the scents of the wind, and how to hear the sighing motion of the stars.

In return, I showed him the skein of energy that lay within. As within, as without, he said, they are mirror patterns. The currents of spiritual power flowed all over the world; they were the rivers of creation from which we came and to which we would return. The shaman, he said-the magus, the mystic-is a fish that breathes both air and water. He can traverse the spiritual currents like a ghost, and still walk the earth like a man.

Since then, I had stumbled across as many schools of magick as flavors at Baskin-Robbins, and the metaphysical rationale for each was as subjective and fleeting as the decision made when choosing a flavor of ice cream. The underlying Truths were like the secrets whispered by the cooks in the back room: there is always sugar and milk, everything else is just preservatives and chemical dyes.

Regional geographies, cultural mores, social histories, divine providences, and local soothsayers all play a part in how the energies of the world are understood. Some schools were filled with shallow spirituality; some were fiercely physical, filled with blood totems and sacrificial rites; some were tangled schemas of mental peregrinations reflected in word games played in dusty parlors. I found schools where simple rhymes sung by children while collecting water contained vibrations of the Word of God; others bound themselves to sequences of arcane gestures and complex physical gyrations like the inexplicable dances of back mountain Baptists and Moroccan fakirs.

In the end, they all reflected the same thing: the world was energy-humanity was energy-and the Universe was a self-perpetuating system. Magick was how we tried to comprehend the chaotic possibilities of creative energy.

I floated on the surface, an idle leaf in the flow, as the Chorus dipped silver ladles in the stream. The warm trickle of absorbed energy further eased the knot in my knee. The twitch in my wrists faded to a dull itch.

Nearby, a disturbance broke the surface of the flow like a fish jumping for a mayfly. A vibrating ball of light, the energy signal moved against the currents, approaching my point of perception. The police were sending someone to talk to me, someone who burned brighter than his surroundings. My interrogator was a magus.

I came out of my trance as the lock on the door clicked. The Chorus took a final sip from the stream, and I wound them down into the dark hole in my chest, hiding them beneath the layers of my meat. The door opened, and I rattled the handcuffs slightly as if the sound had startled me, but made no other effort to get up.

As anticipated, a single man entered the room. He wore a dark green suit with a tiny pattern woven in the fabric, little goldenrod points like seedpods bursting apart in the early summer. His shirt was crisp, and his tie was a melange of reds and violets-too random to suggest anything concrete, but regular enough to suggest machine generation. The Art Deco design of modern business accessories. Clean-shaven, manicured nails, expensive haircut that gave each follicle individual attention (as well as a tint like summer wheat), cuff links that glittered even in the decrepit light of the interrogation room: the package said "Upper Management."

He closed the door quietly, and examined me. Tiny violet pinholes in his pupils twinkled as if he had pricked himself with a straight pin. He was Seeing me, looking beyond the gross physicality of my shell. He was looking for mystical radiances, spirit glimmers, sigil echoes, and other signifiers of a magickal aptitude. His gaze lingered on the white braid about my throat; under close magickal examination, it would glitter, but just enough to seem like a weak bit of flash and not as a magus' focus.

Completing his initial assessment, my interrogator approached the table. He opened the thin manila folder he was carrying and glanced inside. "I'm glad you find this so amusing, Mr. Markham," he said in response to the ghost of a smile on my lips.

"Awkward and tedious, actually," I replied. I rattled the handcuffs a second time.

His eyes flickered toward the sound. "Well," he said, "I apologize for the inconvenience. Bureaucracy, you know. It's the paperwork that needs to be filled out when a veneficus publicly stamps his Will on the world. Fewer lies to fabricate when they keep to themselves."

"Veneficus? Is that the popular term now?" Poisonous, and a sorcerer. How quaint.

He closed the folder and tapped it against my outstretched legs. "You want to tell me what happened?"

"Not really."

A thin crease quirked the edges of his lips. The violet spark in his eyes flashed, and I felt the temperature of the room change. "Too much of a tough guy to talk to me?"

I shrugged, dismissing the shift in energy density. "It's not a question of talking; it's a question of trust."

"I am Lieutenant Pender of the Metropolitan Division, Seattle Police Department," he said, still maintaining the measured facade of Polite Cop, though sarcasm was beginning to creep around the edges. "We can go about this situation two ways: I can make this little nuisance disappear; or, I can drown you in a shitstorm of paperwork. It'll be a year before you can take a piss without filling out a form in triplicate. Your call."

This was our dance then: good cop versus malingering veneficus, how schooled was each of us, and how long would we try to hide our knowledge from the other? I assumed his folder contained the results of a database crawl. The mundane information known about me: my ancient and puerile police record, what financial holdings I had in US-controlled banks, my recent spending patterns, my out-of-date political party affiliation, and a scattered list of entry and exit dates at international airports. What would make him more inclined to consider me as one of his "poisonous sorcerers" was the dearth of real estate holdings or vehicle ownership, a lack of rental history, and a seeming indifference to cell phone technology: the signs of transience, the lack of hooks that tied one to a single location. How he interpreted these two classes of data would reveal what he thought about rogues-adepts who had no clear affiliation with organized temples-and that outlook would temper his amenability.

"You've been in town two weeks, Mr. Markham." He returned to his notes. "Your room at the Monaco-let's see, room 605, is it? — is booked through the weekend, though the folio has been tagged as open-ended. The rental policy on your car is good through the end of the month. You seem to be in a state of flux, caught in some indecision about your plans. Are you planning on staying in Seattle long?"

"It depends."

"On?"

"How long you plan on keeping me cuffed to this table."

He sighed, and traced a long finger across his forehead as if to alleviate some pressure building in his skull. His lips twitched again-downward this time-and he gestured toward the bands circling my wrists. The pulse of his spell was precise and focused. The cuffs clicked open and fell off, clattering on the table like cheap jewelry. It was a simple physical manipulation spell, one we were both very capable of executing. It had simply been a matter of who would show their Will first.

Small victory. It meant nothing really, but it told me we were past the stage of sparring about the existence of magick.

I sat up and swung my legs to my right and hopped off the table. I stood with my back to him, making a show of rubbing my wrists.

"What happened to Gerald Summers?" he asked.

The old man on the ferry.

"Who?" I feigned ignorance as I turned back to the table and my interrogator.

Pender took out a crime scene photograph from the folder. "Mr. Summers," he said, sliding the photo across the table so I could examine it more closely. If I actually needed to, that is. It had been taken from the front of the stall on the ferry, a tightly framed shot of Mr. Summers' head and shoulders.

Summers' wide eyes stared up toward the top of the photo; his mouth gaped in a crooked cry of incomprehension and panic. Doug had only relinquished his grip after Summers' heart had started to collapse. He left the old man with a second of life, just a single tick to feel the shuddering collapse of the failed heart muscle.

"Psychoanimist possession," I said. "Burned him from the inside out." I looked at Pender. "But you knew that, didn't you?"

The skin around his eyes tightened.

"Did you find any of my prints at the scene?" I asked. The single item on my police record was from college. I had made a poor decision at a University of Washington frat party one night. While I had never regretted my actions, the resolution of the evening had involved the police. A full set of fingerprints had been taken. Once in the system, they never came out.

Pender lifted his shoulders. "The forensic investigation hasn't been completed."

"I'll save you the trouble. You won't find any other prints on him. Not mine. Not anyone's. His body walked into that stall, and that was the last thing it ever did. Summers' heart gave out shortly after he sat down. He only had control of his body for a few seconds."

Pender was still holding up the picture. "Possession," he mused. "Mr. Summers was possessed by another human spirit? Is that the psychobabble you expect me to believe?" Testing me: Was he unaware of such techniques or was he probing the integrity of my story, trying to catch me in an inconsistency?

"Ask your detective how much nonsense it is."

His mouth worked a minute, finding the right sequence of words. "Detective Nicols says he has no recollection of the events."

"Does he? He's probably still trying to figure out what happened." If the detective had any recollection of Doug being in his body, it would be vague-fleeting memories detached from his own personal history. They would fade, dissolving into a general unease, touched off by these ghostly fragments. This disorientation would persist at the edge of his consciousness for a few weeks, then it would vanish like wisps of a bad dream.

Though, he could try to hang on to them. Try to attach them to his own storage schemas. He might. He seemed like the persistent type.

"What are you going to do if he keeps thinking about this morning?"

"That's not your problem."

"No, I suppose not. I have a different problem, don't I? What do you want to accomplish here, Lieutenant?" I gestured around the room, indicating the lack of standard interrogation room accoutrements. No two-way mirror. No cameras. No digital audio recorders.

Just two magi, talking.

"I want to understand what happened on the boat."

"I told you: psychoanimist possession. I was following an astral traveler. He started jacking bodies."

"But how did you two get on the ferry? Why were you tracking him?"

I didn't answer.

Pender sighed. He retrieved the picture from the table, and slipped it back into his folder. His attention went to the other pages. "Landis M. Markham," he read. "What does the 'M' stand for?"

"Michael," I told him. "My mother's Catholic heritage. Not my father's favorite." While I preferred it to my given name, that preference was only known to a handful of people. I had been through too many places that believed in the power of names to not protect myself.

"Born and raised in Idaho," he continued. "Moved to Seattle in the early 1990s where you attended the University of Washington. Studied archaeology, though you didn't stay long enough to get a degree."

"There was a scandal," I offered. "Involving hominid skulls."

He ignored my flippancy. "Where did you go, Mr. Markham? You quit your job at REI that same year. Struck by a bit of wanderlust, were you? You've been to a lot of places since then." His finger ran down a list on the page. "TSA provided an interesting list: France, Hungary, Italy, Morocco, China, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Brazil, Argentina, Jamaica. Quite the intrepid traveler, aren't you?"

"It's the nature of my business," I said. "It requires me to, uh, travel." My voice stumbled on the word. I realized the question underlying his emphasis on the word.

Traveler.

It was a code word, not just a descriptive noun but a title. A rank. He was asking me to identify myself: to recognize his word and reply with some acknowledgement, some secret passphrase known to initiates like himself. He was asking me for confirmation that I, too, was a Watcher.

Shit.

This explained our private conversation. Why he dangled the carrot about cleaning up this mess. Pender's offer to make the situation evaporate was honest, if I was one of his brothers. If I flashed him the secret hand signal, he would do exactly what he was here to do: keep the secrets hidden, and make sure the interests of the Watchers were maintained.

The trouble was I hadn't kept up my membership. They thought I was dead. It was the only way to leave the organization.