The Shadow Men

The Worst Day Since Yesterday

Trix padded down the corridor of Peter O’Brien’s apartment in her bare feet, exhausted but still alert. Her skin prickled with awareness of her dislocation. In college it had not been that unusual for her and Jenny to end up sleeping on sofas and in guest rooms after parties off-campus or even across town. But she was an adult now, and she could not relax in a stranger’s home. Knowing that the city around her was foreign to her, that she was an intruder here, only made it worse.

She opened the door to the guest bedroom, the hinges creaking, and stepped inside. Jim glanced up as she closed the door behind her. He sat in a captain’s chair by the window, sketching with a pencil he had found in a small drawer in the girl’s vanity in the corner. O’Brien might call this a guest room, but it had obviously once been occupied by a young female, and he hadn’t changed the decor enough to make it suitably neutral for a guest room.

“Jim,” Trix said.

His only answer was the scritch-scratch of his pencil on the notepad he’d found in the same drawer.

Trix sighed and unzipped her pants, wriggling out of them and letting them puddle at her feet. She moved to the big queen bed, pushed a bunch of throw pillows onto the floor, and drew back the slightly dusty floral spread before sliding in, clad just in her T-shirt and panties.

Jim hadn’t even looked up.

“Mr. Banks,” she said. “Earth to Jim.”

That got him. He glanced at her, then looked out the window at the cityscape he had been sketching. “Don’t you mean parallel Earth to Jim?”

Trix shivered. “This is fucked, right?”

Jim nodded. “Entirely.” He put the pad down without even glancing at the art he had been trying to create, then stood up and started to wander the room, not quite pacing. He sighed in frustration. “I mean, what are we doing here?” he said, more to the beamed ceiling than to Trix, or so it seemed to her.

“Taking the most direct approach,” Trix replied.

Jim had his fingers pushed into his hair, like he might at any moment attempt to tear his own scalp off. Now he stopped his roaming to turn to her, looking foolish with his hands planted on his head.

“You think?” he asked hopefully.

Trix lay her head back on the pillow and stared at him. “I’m lying in a stranger’s bed in a parallel freaking dimension. Yes, I’m totally burned out and I need a rest. Half an hour of shut-eye might be enough to save my sanity. But do you really think I’d be lying here in my undies if I thought for a second that Peter O’Brien wasn’t our best bet, our fastest road to Jenny and Holly?”

Jim exhaled loudly and dropped his hands. He came to sit on the side of the bed and took her hand. “If I didn’t have you with me, I’d already have totally lost it. I mean… if we hadn’t caught up with each other-”

“-we’d both still be thinking we were going crazy, and that maybe there had never been a Jenny to begin with.”

Jim nodded. “I keep thinking we should have looked longer. I know they had hours on us, and they could be anywhere, but she would’ve tried the familiar places first, and we didn’t cover all of them. We should’ve gone to her parents’ restaurant.”

“She’d have figured out something was badly amiss,” Trix said. “Felt something wrong. Maybe she saw something that scared her away from familiar places.”

“But your place? She would have gone looking for you.”

“And she wouldn’t have found me. The odds of us finding her and Holly standing on the sidewalk in front of my building when we got there are about a kabillion to one.” Trix tugged his hand a little, forcing him to meet her gaze. “You heard what Mr. O’Brien said. He’s going to find them. But there are preparations to be made, and one of those is for us to rest a little so we can focus.”

“You think I can sleep?”

Trix cocked her head. “You think I can? Listen, we’ll go crazy if we just pace the room while we’re waiting for our Irish Oracle friend to get his shit together. It’s not doing Jenny and Holly any good. Just lie down with me for a little while. Rest your eyes. Seriously. It’s dusty, but it feels good to lie down.”

Still, Jim seemed reluctant.

“Show me what you were sketching,” Trix said, pointing at the notepad he’d left on his chair.

Finally, given a task to perform, Jim seemed to step back from the frantic edge he had been teetering on. He snatched up the pad and brought it to her, sitting on the edge of the mattress.

Trix stared at the shaded pencil drawing of the view from that window, the row houses across the street from O’Brien’s Bar and the taller buildings in the distance, the church steeples, the old stone contrasting strangely with the sleekly modern buildings that the Irish-influenced Boston must have built only in the past decade or two.

Jim kicked off his shoes and slid into bed beside her, sighing as he propped himself up on his elbow to study the drawing with her. “Look familiar?” he asked.

Trix tried to ignore the cold knot forming in her stomach. “You know it does.”

She had dreamed this city dozens of times. In her disturbed dreams, she had walked its dark streets. If she went out right now, she thought she might be able to find her way almost anywhere without a map or directions. Those strange journeys had always felt like more to her, as though she had actually traveled, truly explored the intimidating city and learned its secret ways and corners.

“To me, too,” Jim said.

Though his dreams were never as clear or memorable as hers, Jim had done his own sleepwalking, taken journeys to this Irish-hued Boston, as well as another. Now, though, he didn’t need to paint from the memories of dreams.

Trix stared at the sketch. “Crazy.”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed.

Trix set the pad on the nightstand and slid farther under the bedclothes, nestling her head on the soft pillow. “Rest,” she said.

“What do we have, an hour or so before O’Brien said he’d come get us?”

“About that.”

Relenting at last, Jim put his head on the pillow, but he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Trix scooted closer to him and put a hand on his chest, closing her eyes, exhaustion a blanket wrapped warmly around her. Fear and hope chased each other’s tails in the back of her mind, but she tried to block them out.

“Do you think-” Jim began.

“Hush,” Trix said. “Rest. We’ll find them. I promise.”

That seemed to mollify him, if only for the moment. She felt him take a deep breath, and when he exhaled he seemed to relax somewhat. The window was open and a cool breeze drifted through, rustling the curtains and carrying the sounds of distant engines. The Banks clan were like a family to her. Holly might as well have been her niece. Trix and Jim were in this together. Lying there with him, she felt closer to him than she ever had before. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he tried to calm himself.

“Not exactly the member of the family I would’ve thought I’d end up sleeping with,” Trix mumbled into her pillow.

Jim laughed softly, then a little louder, and then he leaned over to kiss her forehead and pulled her closer. Sharing their warmth-and their hope and fear-they lay together and began to surrender to weariness.

Trix glanced over at the night-darkened window. Somewhere out there, in this foreign Boston, Jenny and Holly were scared and alone. Or were they? The one thing she and Jim had not yet discussed was the possibility that his girls weren’t in this Boston at all, but in the other-the third, Brahmin Boston. Trix couldn’t even consider it. They were here. They had to be, because though Veronica had shown them the trick to seeing the thin places between cities, she wasn’t sure they would really be able to cross over when the need arose.

We’re coming, Trix thought, her cheek resting on Jim’s chest. Help is on the way.

As sleep claimed her, she smiled sadly at the irony.

Jim woke to the sound of shattering glass. The room seemed to tilt for a moment as he battled the dislocation of waking in a strange place. He looked around wildly, saw that the windows were intact, the door still closed, nothing at all out of the ordinary except that he was in a strange bed in a strange room with a half-naked lesbian who happened to be one of his dearest friends.

“What just happened?” Trix murmured sleepily, propping herself up.

Jim shook his head, wondering the same thing. If it had woken her as well, then it hadn’t been a dream, which meant the sound had come from nearby. Outside? Maybe. Downstairs? Also maybe.

He crawled out of bed, gesturing for her to remain, and to be quiet.

“Fuck that,” Trix whispered. Of course she did. It was Trix. Jim should have known better.

As he slipped his shoes on and Trix dragged on her pants, they heard a muffled shout coming from the bar downstairs. O’Brien’s voice, raised in fury. A pounding noise began, like the fist of God knocking on the front door, and the whole building shook in time to that awful rhythm. A crack appeared in the wall, running from the upper edge of the door frame to the corner of the room.

“What the hell is that?” Jim whispered, not sure if Trix would hear him over the noise-not really sure if he was even talking to her.

Trix had one shoe on and the other one in her right hand as she hurried past him to the door.

“Wait,” Jim said.

“For what?” Trix asked, spinning on him, eyes wide with fear.

More glass shattered downstairs, and Jim pictured the shelves of hard liquor behind the bar being smashed to the floor. There’d been a big mirror there as well. He glanced at the window, wishing there was a fire escape out there so they could go down and survey the fracas from outside.

“Weapons,” he said. “We’re not going down there empty-handed.”

Trix put on her other shoe. “There’s an iron on the top shelf in the bathroom.”

Jim picked up the heavy crystal lamp from the bedside table, pulled off the shade, and yanked the cord out of the wall. He glanced at Trix and nodded for her to go ahead, and she turned the knob and swung the door inward.

Out in the corridor, Jim went for the door that led downstairs to the bar. Trix raced into the bathroom and emerged holding the iron Peter O’Brien had probably used for years to take the wrinkles out of his clothes. It seemed all too mundane a detail to exist in the same reality as the shouting and the noises of destruction from below.

A roar of pain rose from the bar, becoming a scream. The pounding stopped in a violent splintering of wood, and Peter O’Brien’s voice fell silent.

Trix slipped up beside Jim, reaching out to stop him from opening the door. “What the hell are we doing?” she whispered.

She didn’t need to explain. Jim wondered the same thing. From the sound of it, whatever was going on downstairs wasn’t some simple bar fight.

“He’s our best chance of finding them!” Jim whispered back.

Trix nervously licked her lips, then nodded.

Jim tore the door open and burst through it, running down the stairs, wielding the crystal lamp like a club. Trix came right behind him. He had a moment to wonder if she was thinking what he was thinking-that they were batshit crazy, that these were piss-poor weapons-and then the silence in the bar was broken by a human voice. It might have been O’Brien’s, but the big Irishman sounded very small now. “Don’t,” the voice pleaded. “You’ll destroy it all.”

As they hit the curve in the stairwell, the words were punctuated with a terrible crash. Jim leaped the last few steps-there was no door, only an archway leading into the bar-and as he stepped into O’Brien’s, music started to play. Flogging Molly’s “Cruel Mistress.” He knew it well.

“Jesus,” Trix whispered as she stepped into the bar behind him.

The place was a ruin of overturned tables, broken chairs, and shattered glass, but Jim only got a glimpse of the wreckage-and the blood on the brass bar rail-before he noticed something shift near the huge square saw-toothed space where the plate-glass front window had once been. A figure stood amid the shattered glass, the puzzle of partially painted fragments that had once spelled out O’BRIEN’S in green and gold among them. Taller than a man, it was nevertheless shaped like one. A silver shadow, it seemed to have simply appeared there, standing atop the debris.

No. It was there, he thought. You just didn’t see it at first.

“What are they?” Trix asked, her voice a fearful rasp.

Jim blinked, and he saw that she was right. Beyond the demolished front of the bar, two more of the wraiths stood out in the street, faceless silhouettes who seemed somehow still to be looking at him and Trix. Shadows fell upon the smooth slopes of their faces, suggesting eyes and mouth where there were none, only minor ridges that hinted at noses. They were the memories of men, all personality torn away.

Fear clenched at his gut, but Jim took two steps toward the thing still inside the bar, feeling the weight of the crystal lamp in his hand. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, though he thought that Trix’s what was indeed a better question.

In the distance, sirens wailed, coming nearer. Jim held his breath. For the first time since he had fled a high school keg party where weed and coke had been in plentiful supply, he feared the arrival of the police. In this world, he and Trix didn’t even exist. They were the ultimate illegal aliens.

“Why did you do this?” Trix shouted at them.

The music from the jukebox changed to the Von Bondies’ “C’mon, C’mon,” and Jim glanced toward the source and nearly retched. Peter O’Brien’s lower torso and legs stuck out from beneath the heavy machinery, its glass case spiderwebbed with cracks but somehow not caved in.

“Jim!” Trix cried.

He turned, raising the lamp, thinking he had to defend himself, but she hadn’t shouted because they were under attack. She’d yelled in surprise.

The wraiths were gone.

“Did you see which way they went?” Jim asked, taking a few steps toward the front of the bar, glass crunching underfoot.

Trix didn’t move. “I’m not sure they went anywhere.”

Jim glanced over his shoulder at her. “What?”

She gestured with the iron. “They just… moved. First the one inside. Like it took a step and just… walked out of the world. Then the others went, too. How the hell do we know they’re really gone?”

Jim stared at the spot on the partially painted glass fragments where the first wraith had been standing. He moved to the left, trying to look at the space from different angles, but saw nothing. His heart pounded in his chest, full of fear of something he couldn’t see.

The sirens grew louder. A dog barked. Inside the bar, liquor dripped from broken bottles and beer from busted taps. The smell of it filled the place. A cold weight settled on his heart. This might not be his Boston, but it was not make-believe. This was a real city, with ordinary people who lived ordinary lives. He would have given anything to be one of them again-anything but the family he had lost. They were worth any sacrifice. “Screw it,” he said, dropping the crystal lamp, which broke apart when it hit the floor.

He walked toward O’Brien’s broken body. The racks of liquor bottles behind the bar had been decimated. Half of the mirror had fallen away, and the rest clung to the wall like the blade of a guillotine. The brass bar rail was bent and smeared with O’Brien’s blood, and red splashes of his life dotted the wooden floor.

“What now?” Trix said, and he heard a thunk behind him as she cast aside the iron. The optimism she had been trying so hard to project had been forgotten. “Jim, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t afford to be questioned by the cops.”

“We’re going,” Jim said. But he made no move to leave. Instead, he moved closer to the Oracle of this Irish Boston, picturing Peter O’Brien’s face, still hearing the amiable bear of a man’s voice in his head. A couple of hours, that was all he had said he needed, and then he would have tracked down Jenny and Holly. How many years, even decades, had this man been the Oracle? And then within an hour or two of them showing up he was dead.

Oh, you bitch, Jim had heard him say, and he looked around for the letter, keen to see what it had contained.

O’Brien’s legs shifted.

“Jesus!” Jim shouted, staggering backward.

“Did he just move?” Trix asked, freaking out.

“Definitely,” Jim said.

O’Brien shifted again. His skull and upper chest had been crushed beneath the jukebox. No way could he survive that. Almost as if Jim had wished him dead, O’Brien’s legs settled and went still, and he knew that what they had just seen had been the man’s final throes.

Trix grabbed his arm. “Jim. We have to go!”

He nodded, backing away. Together they hurried to the door, only to find it locked from the inside. The wraiths had come in through the plate-glass window, with its painted letters and stylized shamrock. Jim unlocked the door and tugged it open, and he and Trix slipped out of the bar.

Along the street, the first police car sped around the corner.

“Don’t run,” Trix snapped.

Taking his hand, she led him away from the bar as though they were lovers out for a stroll. But Jim saw faces at windows, and people standing on the opposite sidewalk-it must be near last call by now, but they had spilled out of Dwyer’s New Dublin Pub just up the street-and already fingers were being pointed. Some of the spectators were shouting questions at them. A couple of them, wearing Boston Celtics basketball jerseys, started crossing the street.

“We waited too long,” Jim said, knowing that every moment they weren’t spending trying to find Jenny and Holly, the trail was getting that much colder.

Trix squeezed his hand. “Okay. Now we run.”

And that was when the earthquake hit.

Trix put her hands out as if learning to surf. The street bucked hard beneath their feet, then harder still. This was no mere tremor. Panicked people flooded from Dwyer’s New Dublin, across the street. The ground lurched up and then dropped, again and again, as though some wicked toddler had made it his toy and intended to shake it until it broke. The police car skidded to a halt, slewing sideways as a rift opened in the pavement.

Glass shattered all around them. Alarms pealed. Masonry cracked. A fire hydrant less than ten feet from Trix exploded, water spouting upward, showering around them. A piece of the hydrant flew past her head and shattered the rear windshield of a parked car. Jim grabbed her wrist and tugged her back toward O’Brien’s.

“No!” she shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the roar and rumble of the earth.

He tried to tell her something, but all she could make out was “… outside wall!” Still, she understood. In an earthquake, the safest place inside a building was next to an object that might be crushed-a table or bed-and not beneath it. But outside, in a built-up area, curling against a building’s outer wall might prevent them from being injured. Even if the wall fell, it would likely not collapse right down to ground level. And between the fallen wall and what was left of its base, a triangle of life.

Jim tried to pull her toward the building. People screamed. Trix spotted a little yellow dog chasing its tail on the sidewalk up the street. The world continued to buck and crack, so long now that she feared it would never end. A hundred yards along the street, a traffic light toppled onto a swerving minivan, which careened through the front window of a pharmacy.

Beyond where the light had fallen, the three faceless men who had killed O’Brien stood watching her and Jim, motionless, as though the quake could not move them. The moment she noticed them it was as though her perception changed, and she saw others-one standing in front of a hat shop, another crouched on the second-story ledge of an apartment house. The world shook, but the faceless men remained impassive, only watching as Boston tore itself apart… again.

Shit, is that what this is? she wondered. Is it splintering again?

When part of the street gave way, the sewer cracking open like some ravenous maw, Trix decided Jim had a point. She gave in so abruptly that it was she who pulled him back against O’Brien’s. Even the illusion of safety was better than this chaos. A fissure split the sidewalk only feet from where they’d been standing a moment before. Jim held her tight, and Trix pulled him down until they sat, leaning against each other.

The ground heaved up beneath them. Trix struck her head on the masonry; Jim squeezed her hand. The whole world roared, and behind them the ceiling inside O’Brien’s gave way, the second-story apartment crashing down into the ruin of the bar, burying the city’s Oracle in the rubble of his life.

The shaking eased, the ground steadied, but Trix still listed to one side, staggered by the sudden ending of the quake. The street sang to cries of anguish and the pointless blaring of alarms. Fires bloomed in the distance. She heard several dull thumps and wondered whether they were gas-main explosions.

“Is it over?” Trix asked, standing. Jim held her hand, and they both took a shaky step away from the building.

“Careful,” Jim said. “There could be-”

Later, Trix would be sure the next word had been meant to be “aftershocks,” but Jim never had a chance to say it.

It felt like a collision. The sidewalk did not buck this time but instead shifted to the east with such force that they fell, rolling into the street. Trix scraped her right cheek and both arms on the pavement. The explosion tore the sky apart, deafening thunder followed by a roaring cascade that sounded to Trix’s bleeding ears like the whole city coming down around her.

She called Jim’s name and looked up to see him on his hands and knees, trying to rise. Screams that sounded distant were actually coming from Dwyer’s New Dublin. People had been thrown against the jagged fins of plate glass jutting from the frame of the pub’s front window, and a young blond woman hung impaled, staring dumbly at the bloody glass shard sticking out of her chest, her expression not of pain but of sorrow, wondering how and why.

Jim shouted something loud, incoherent-a cry of shock and terror.

Trix sat up and tried to look around. She was shaking, bleeding. A cloud of dust spread across the sky. “What was that, at the end?” she said, barely aware that she was shouting. “Was that a fucking nuke?”

They were both coughing on the dust that roiled in the street. The ground had stopped moving, but Trix didn’t trust it anymore. As she managed to get onto her knees, she kept touching the pavement, expecting to be thrown down again. It took her a few seconds before she realized that Jim hadn’t said anything more. She looked up and saw him standing, staring over the tops of buildings, looking even more frightened and anguished than he had when she had first come to him to ask him about Jenny and Holly’s disappearance.

Trix tried to see what he was looking at. She narrowed her eyes. They stung and watered with the dust, and she wondered what chemicals she was breathing in from the devastation around her.

On the next block, a silver roof ridge gleamed in the midst of the swirling dust. Trix frowned, staring at it, wondering how she had missed it before. It must be an office building, but the architect had designed it to appear as though the top had been sheared off at an angle. It was made of glass and steel, and now the majority of the windows were broken. She could see emergency lights flickering inside. It was perhaps twenty stories-a tower in this old Boston neighborhood.

And there were others. A modern church stood two blocks down. She blinked as she stared and realized that the street had split around it-and not only the street but the row of shops that had been there before. It looked as though the church had fallen from the sky, like Dorothy’s house on Oz.

Sirens wailed in the distance, some growing nearer. Emergency rescue efforts were under way. The fires raged across the city skyline, and as Trix studied it, she remembered her dreams and Jim’s paintings, and the sketch he had done only an hour ago, and she understood.

The skyline had changed.

A massive cloud fed by the black smoke from several huge fires began to bloom above the city. It let in faint moonlight, and at last she realized what Jim had seen the second he had struggled to stand. He’d been peering in that direction ever since, as though waiting for confirmation that he had not imagined it.

“That’s impossible,” Trix said, a terrible numbness spreading through her.

In the distance, the huge, ornate cathedral they had seen upon their arrival in this parallel city had been disastrously altered. At first Trix thought the three towers that thrust up through the roof of the cathedral were separate buildings, but then she realized that their upper stories were joined together, a massive tripod high-rise office complex with a revolving restaurant above, capped by a needle spire blinking warning lights to warn air traffic over the city.

Jim shuffled up beside her, cradling his bloody left arm against his chest. “You recognize that building?” he asked.

Trix nodded. It had taken her a moment to remember, but she did know it. She had dreamed it a handful of times, years ago. And she understood now that it had been after her drowning in one reality, and not the others. “It doesn’t belong here,” she said.

“No,” Jim agreed. “It doesn’t.”

Now the people in the street were screaming and pointing. They had seen it, too. But Trix studied them, and she realized that not all of them had been there before. There were too many. And even here, the buildings were different-weird variations. The pharmacy the van had crashed into had a different sign, now identifying it as an antiquarian bookstore. But the product that had spilled onto the sidewalk belonged to the pharmacy. The facade of Dwyer’s New Dublin had been altered completely. Instead of an Irish pub, it had become the Yankee Fish Company.

Trix turned to see that the sign above the shattered window of O’Brien’s Bar hadn’t changed at all. Collision, she thought. It is a collision.

Jim glanced around at the shell-shocked people moving through the streets. Cries for help carried above the sirens and alarms and the sounds of grief-stricken wailing. Many people had died tonight, and many more were still in need. Peter O’Brien might be dead-murdered by those wraiths and buried in the wreckage of his bar-but hundreds, perhaps thousands of others would still be alive, trapped in the rubble.

He couldn’t help them.

Injured left arm still held against his rib cage-it wasn’t broken, just badly bruised and scraped-he slipped his right arm around Trix’s waist. “Come on,” he whispered into her ear.

She went along without argument, looking at him with wide eyes. “To where?”

Jim said nothing. He just escorted her along the broken street, survivors of disaster, and made an effort not to meet the eyes of anyone they passed. Together they crossed toward the mouth of an alley, where a wrought-iron fire escape had partially torn away from the building on their left and now leaned precariously against its twin. Trix kept glancing around, her eyes full of fear.

“What are you looking for?” Jim asked.

“Those things from the bar,” she said. “The ones that killed O’Brien.”

“Wraiths,” Jim said.

“You’ve seen them before?” she asked, misunderstanding.

“No. I just… that’s how I thought of them. They were there and not there, all at the same time.” He didn’t see any of them now, but somehow that was no comfort. He feared they might be there, whether he could see them or not.

“During the quake… they were watching us,” Trix said, a brittle edge to her voice.

“I know,” Jim said as he led her into the alley. He glanced around again, but not for the wraiths this time. What he had to say was not something he wanted anyone to overhear.

“The two Bostons,” Trix said, searching his eyes for answers. “The two that splintered off… they, like, crashed back together.”

Yeah, Jim thought. That’s the word.

From what Veronica had told them, he’d had the impression that when McGee caused the schism it had been seamless, unnoticed by the people who had been duplicated in the process. A parting of realities in an otherwise straight, orderly world, like a bubble of possibilities on a single two-dimensional string. But now that the parallel cities and their citizens had been duplicated, they couldn’t be erased. Forcing them back together had caused terrible destruction. Buildings that predated the schism-that still existed in both cities-had changed but somehow been merged. But where there were different structures in the two cities, like the cathedral and the tripod building-catastrophe. Metal merged with stone, glass with wood, in an explosive amalgamation.

“I’m afraid, Trix.”

Her eyes went wider. “No shit. What if it happens again? What if our Boston… Jesus, I can’t even think about it. How do we find Jenny and Holly now? How do we get out of here?”

She started back into the street, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. She spun around to stare at him, her face lit with anger.

“You don’t get it,” he said.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the sealed envelope that Veronica had given them to deliver to the Oracle of the Brahmin Boston. He held his breath a second, afraid to open it.

“Wait…,” she said.

Jim stared at her, ice clutching at his insides. “We crossed over. We went to the Oracle, and then those wraiths came for him.”

Her grief contorted her face, shattering her beauty. “You don’t think…? No.” She shook her head, then threw out a hand to indicate the devastated city. “You think we caused this?”

“Not us, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence. How can it be? It’s got to be related.”

They both stared at the envelope, the name and address of the Oracle of Brahmin Boston scrawled on the front. They had promised they would not open it. Veronica had warned them that disaster could result. But they had not opened the one addressed to Peter O’Brien, and disaster had come just the same.

“Veronica,” Trix whispered.

Jim tore it open, careful to preserve the address on the envelope. He pulled out the letter inside-a single sheet of paper-and quickly unfolded it. “Shit,” he whispered.

The page was blank apart from a single deep-black spot at its center.

“Oh, no,” Trix said, snatching it from him and staring at it. She looked up at him. “It’s nothing. No message. Jesus, the wraiths were the message. She must have had them following us… and we led them right to him.”

“But she knew his address!”

“Yeah, but…” Trix trailed off.

“A message,” Jim said. “A… something else. I don’t know. I think maybe he knew the moment he opened it.”

“She used us,” Trix said. “Somehow.”

“Yeah.” Jim looked around at the crying, bleeding, broken people and the ruin of two Bostons. If they were right, it meant that not only had Veronica betrayed and used them, not only had she arranged for the murder of Peter O’Brien-and the third Oracle as well, if they hadn’t figured it out-but it meant that the old bitch had wanted this to happen. She had planned for this destruction.

He folded the envelope and almost blank page and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he took Trix’s hand. “Come on.”

“Why? We’ve got nowhere to go.”

Coughing on the dust of ruined buildings and the smoke from a hundred fires, with cries and sirens still ringing out, he pulled her close. “Jenny and Holly are still out there somewhere.”

Trix bit her lip, nodded, and wiped tears from her eyes.