Lightbreaker

IV

The members of La Societe Lumineuse were Witnesses, True Seeing observers whose focus was the preservation of magickal knowledge. A worldwide network of subversive agents and dedicated spies, they were positioned in auspicious locations and key jobs so as to manipulate events and individuals. Secret movers and shakers, acting to keep the occult hidden. They were based in Paris, and their original name has been purposefully forgotten. They had learned from the lesson so brutally put to their original incarnation when thirteen of them were burned at the stake in the fourteenth century. They acted in secrecy because the rest of the world preferred ignorance, preferred not to be reminded of the necessity for guardians of the occult lore.

I had been in Paris once upon a time. Like a fairy tale. Self-cast as the hero of that fable, I studied for several years, even reached Journeyman-a neophyte grade in the art of Watching. Journeymen who demonstrate aptitude and ambition become Travelers and go forth to earn their place in the world, always watching and reporting back to their masters. My fairy tale collapsed before I could be graded for Traveler. Every story has a hero, a heroine, and a villain. In the end, the tale got rewritten; I became the villain.

"And what is your business?" Pender sat in one of the two chairs at the table. He indicated the other chair. While his body language projected indifference, his eyes watched me closely. Witnessing. At the very least, Pender had to be a Traveler.

"Antiques." I swallowed the obstruction in my throat that had been raised by the shadow of my past. I had carefully avoided the Watchers since I had left Paris, preferring the anonymity of death to the. . headache of being alive. If he reported me to his masters, they would be curious as to why I was running around without a leash. One of them would be more than curious. "My clients have very specific tastes. I have to go where the markets are hot if I want to stay in business."

"How do your clients find you?" he asked. He gave no hint he had even offered a recognition signal, no sense he was waiting for me to acknowledge his code word.

Was I imagining a connection which didn't exist? "Personal references." I sat down.

"Ah, that sort of antique market," he said. "Were you working for a client last night?"

"Visiting a friend."

"The traveler on the boat?"

I shook my head. He had just asked me to acknowledge myself again. When he decided I was unaware of his connection to the Watchers-when he decided I wasn't one of them-the opportunity to dismiss this situation would vanish. What would my options be? To ask for a lawyer and try to get bail posted? To demand to know the charges being levied against me and protest my innocence?

A pall of silence hung in the room while we both considered which direction to take the conversation. "You pose an interesting problem, Mr. Markham," he said. I didn't intrude into his thought, and he let that statement hang for a minute. He examined the pages in his folder. "Your father taught at Western Washington University, didn't he?" he asked, momentarily setting aside the quandary of my presence.

"Yeah, he taught Washington State history."

"Used to be a farmer. Potatoes, was it?"

I nodded.

"Fairly successful transformation for a man who never finished high school."

"He was good at applying himself," I said. "He worked hard for the degree and was proud of it." Proud, and always a little nervous the rest of the administration would discover he was a high school dropout from southern Idaho. His father had died unexpectedly one summer. He had suffered a mild heart attack while working the field, and lost control of the tractor. By the time they found him and the vehicle in the ditch that ran along the southern edge of the property, the sun had taken him away from the family. My father took over and, even with his youthful will and energetic body, the local potato conglomerate still managed to gut the family for the land. It just took a few years longer than their projections. Small victories. My father's mother died in her sleep two days after the paperwork for the sale was signed.

My mother had always been a frail phantom, a child of New England more suited to central heating and sturdy brownstones than windswept winters and arid summers. She died the winter after the dissolution of the family farm. My father brought what was left of the family-me and my sister-west to Seattle, where he tried to bury the past. For the rest of his life, my father, no matter how hard he tried, felt that he could never fully get the Idaho dirt out from beneath his fingernails.

He would come home from teaching and obsessively wash his hands. Before he left in the morning, he would repeat the same ritual-soap and water, soap and water-until they were pink and shining. Innocent. Purified.

I glanced down at my hands, resting on the table. My knuckles, broken more than once; the scars on the back of my right hand, ugly kisses left by steel and bone; the twisted piece of flesh at the base of my left thumb. The things we learn from our fathers: our hands betray what we have done.

"And yet," Pender noted, "you never finished school."

I shrugged, putting my hands in my lap. "My sister was always better at applying herself."

"Chelsea married an investment banker from Barcelona, didn't she?" The question was rhetorical; I knew he had the specifics on the page. "Migel Guastera. She hasn't been back to the States since your father's funeral in '02."

"That seems about right."

"You don't talk much?"

"Differences of opinion make casual talk sort of pointless."

"You don't like her husband?"

"I've never met him."

"Does your sister work?"

"She does art restoration. Local galleries in Barcelona, mainly."

He raised an eyebrow. "With your line of work, there's no overlap? No reason for regular contact?"

"There's a lot of people doing art restoration out there; and I don't have a lot of reasons to visit Barcelona."

"And your business on the peninsula last night had nothing to do with art or antiques?"

I shook my head. "Visiting an old friend."

"He'll confirm this?"

"Why wouldn't he?"

Pender gave me a toothsome smile that didn't extend to his eyes. The dart and feint of our conversation was entertaining him. It was a game he thought he could win. I was starting to tire of it. What would he do if I slapped him with the fact that I knew he was a Watcher? Testis sum. I am a Witness. It was a passphrase used in the Witnessing rituals of the Journeymen. It would definitely abort our little conversation, but would it get me out of this room without creating further complications?

He's going to call Paris anyway; you're running out of time.

"Douglas Rassmussen," I said, opting for a different distraction. Stay away from Paris.

"Pardon?" He closed the file.

"That's his name. The traveler. That's the guy you should be talking to." I leaned toward him. "He left the boat in another body, which means there's another charred corpse waiting for you to find. Not to mention how he gets back into his original body."

"Back to his body? What do you mean?"

"He wasn't acting alone." The flickering colors, the sensory impressions stolen from Doug, danced in my head. "It was some sort of ritual. He wasn't bodiless by accident. He had help transcending his natural state."

"I thought you said there was only one spirit?"

I sighed and looked away. Was he being intentionally dense, or did he just not have any idea what psychoanimism was?

Be sure.

"He and his friends are doing rituals of separation. They've learned how to split the light from the meat. Completely. This isn't astral projection; they are separating soul from body. I think he was trying to get back to his body; I think that was the whole point of their ritual."

"Why? What was the point?"

"To prove his worthiness, to prove that he was ready to join their inner circle." To prove he could survive the experience.

Some of the sly amusement dropped away from Pender's face. "They're organized?"

"It didn't happen spontaneously."

"You seem to know a lot about this sort of ritual."

"He possessed the old man, bent him to his Will."

Violet dots swam in his irises as he waited for me to give him more information. "And?"

"It's an abomination. It kills the body and the spirit. Our journey to enlightenment isn't a path that requires innocents to suffer. That's not knowledge." He was Watching me now, gauging my unconscious reaction. I gave him little to read, just verbal propaganda drawn from a few thousand years of Roman Catholic history and an expression full of shock and horror.

A corner of his mouth twitched. "Is that part of your religious upbringing, Mr. Markham, or are you trying to impress upon me the depth of your compassion?"

"My compassion."

"Ah," he nodded, and I managed to keep a straight face. "Yes, of course." He touched the corner of his mouth as if to stop the twitch. "And, when you had your talk with this transgressor, were you going to ask him to vacate the old man's body?"

"It was too late for Mr. Summers. I was trying to stop him from possessing another body. The woman in the Acura. Your detective. The driver of the car that. ."

Pender's gaze fell toward the closed folder. One of the pages inside had to be the field report from the police on the scene. His fingers moved idly on the cover, tracing some mental pattern in his head. "A Cadillac," he offered. "The car that hit you was a Cadillac SRX. He was controlling the driver's body?"

"Yes."

"And you think his possession has killed this person as well?" His interest seemed piqued, as if I had finally offered enough information that he couldn't dismiss the possibility that I was the smaller problem here. Now there was something larger to deal with than just an adept performing an Act of Will in public.

"Even if he just possessed her long enough to return to his real body-wherever it had been taken-she'll be severely touched. And she'll know who they are." I nodded. "Yeah, if Doug doesn't burn her out, they'll kill her."

"Do you know who they are?"

"No, just the one guy. Douglas Rassmussen. Son of Frederick and Amber." I spelled the last name for him. "I don't know who his friends are."

Something passed through his eyes, something he hid almost as instantly as it flared. I was left with a momentary spasm in my gut as if the ground had unexpectedly rippled beneath me. The name meant something to him.

"Well," he said, standing up. "I'll look into it." He held up the folder. "I'll check the databases."

"What about me?"

"I haven't decided, Mr. Markham. You're a wild card and I'm not sure I should let you run free in this city."

"My business is almost finished," I said. "There would be no reason for me to stay here after I was done."

"You never did tell me what your business here was."

"Looking for an old friend," I said. "A woman."

His tongue touched the edge of his lip, almost mocking me. "She break your heart?"

"Sort of."

"Financial dispute?"

"No."

"Pity. Financial disagreements rarely end in bloodshed. Just lawyers." He shook his head as he walked to the door. "Matters involving heartbreak. .?" He punched in a code on the door's security lock. As he opened the door, he left me with a parting observation. "They always seem to produce collateral damage."