Lightbreaker, p.10
Lightbreaker, page 10
The ride to the seventeenth floor was smooth, and both of us watched the news scrawl on the tiny TV monitor mounted on the inner wall of the elevator cage. Flooding in New Orleans, Hollywood starlet in rehab, Congressional back-biting: plus ça change.
I did the lock trick on the 1712's pair, and we slipped inside Doug's condo to check out his view and the 800 square feet that came with it. Seventeen-twelve was on the northern side of the building, affording us a view of Queen Anne and the Seattle Center. Not much in the way of water or mountain, which meant this condo had been slightly cheaper than the western- or eastern-facing units. Maybe. These days, it was hard to say if that sort of aesthetic detail depressed real estate pricing anymore.
The architecture adhered to the modern minimalist trend still hot in the celebrity gossip magazines—off-white walls with white cabinetry and steel appliances. Personality-bare living waiting for its owner to imprint it. Doug, however, appeared to have very little aptitude for interior design. His only contribution to the décor was a pair of generic Indonesian landscape prints on the living room walls, a flat screen TV hung on the wall between the prints, a couple of glazed vases in the insert over the gas fireplace, and a wildflower calendar in the kitchen. The furniture was Swedish Geometric, straight from the nearest IKEA warehouse, and the contents of the kitchen drawers and cupboards had been bought on the same shopping trip.
Nicols looked in the refrigerator, counted the bottles of spring water and glanced in the crisper to see if anything was still fresh. Two bottles of champagne lay on the top rack. A lonely box of baking soda sat in the back.
Half of the top rack of the dishwasher was filled with teacups, and the bottom rack had two small plates and a handful of silverware. The sink was empty, and the garbage can underneath contained a profusion of Styrofoam and paper to-go cartons. Nicols poked at a few of the containers. "Thai," he said. "A lot of Thai."
"So our boy isn't big on hanging out at home," I said. An old rotary phone—molded plastic that qualified more as a piece of shit from Goodwill than a retro artifact from The Sharper Image catalog—was plugged into the phone jack beneath the wall calendar. He didn't seem to have an answering machine. "It's hooked up to the internal switchboard," Nicols explained, seeing my confusion. "Like every other kid these days, he's completely dependent on his cell phone. This is for the intercom in the lobby." He played with the twisted cord. "The fifty-cent solution."
The vases were molded assembly-line artifacts meant to look hand-made but the "Made in Taiwan" sticker on the bottom ruined that mood. Against the wall opposite the TV, there was a table between two tall bookcases. I did a quick scan of the books in both cases as Nicols went through the two-drawer file cabinet shoved under the desk. Crowley, Mathers, Plotinus' Enneads, an abridged version of Frazer's Golden Bough, a recent translation of The Corpus Hermeticum, Eliade's Shamanism, and The Nag Hammadi caught my eye. The rest of the "esoteric" titles were the sort of pabulum sold by the case to the local New Age shops. The other case was filled with thrillers, New York Times bestsellers, and Oprah's Book Club selections that made one look well-read, and a scattered handful on fly fishing.
"Investment banker," Nicols announced as he found a stash of financial statements. "Looks like he works for a brokerage downtown." He flipped through the pages in a file folder. "Five years now." He glanced at the bookcases. "Anything?"
I shook my head. "Nothing you couldn't buy at Borders. It's mostly stuff the big publishers flooded the market with a few years ago when everyone was talking about New Age Magick, trying to address Pre- and Post-Millennial fears. That sort of bullshit." I swept my hands to include both cases. "Little of it is really useful. It's the sort of collection you'd find in the room of a fourteen-year-old girl who thinks being a wiccan pagan and a lesbian are the same thing. Doug's well beyond the 'let's make a love potion!' crap most of these books offer."
"What about the useful stuff?"
"It's the wrong sort of details. Eliade's Shamanism is a good magico-religious overview of the old techniques, but the rituals Doug and the others are doing aren't part of the archaic practices. The couple of Crowley books are better, but they're still filled with distractions and practices which have no bearing on what we saw in the barn.
"Admittedly, these skills aren't going to be publicly available—most of the practical manuscripts were hand-copied, passed from magus to magus. They aren't the sort of thing that you're going to leave haphazardly on a shelf. The last time I had the opportunity to examine a real alchemical text was a year ago in Singapore. A fourteenth-century copy of Speculum Alchemiae. The buyer paid more than five hundred thousand dollars for it."
"So if he's really experimenting in radical stuff, why is there so much junk on his shelf?" Nicols asked.
"Exactly. He seems to lead a pretty Spartan existence. Why waste the space on populist crap written for dilettantes?"
Nicols put the folder back in the file cabinet. "He's never here," he sighed. "The DMV records put him at twenty-eight years old. According to his pay stubs, he's making six figures a year. But there's no sign that he's even paying attention to anything. There's not a shred of personality in this place. Might as well hang a 'Vacancy' sign over the door."
"I figured you'd appreciate the décor."
"Why is that?"
"It's not much different than your place."
Nicols sucked at a tooth as he looked around again as if to see the room from a different perspective. "No," he said with some care. "He's never lost anything. This is just a shell that hasn't been filled."
An involuntary shiver ran up my spine. A shell. A husk emptied of light and life, one that didn't recognize its lack of humanity. It just kept breathing and functioning, waiting for something to make it feel less empty. Something to fill it.
"You okay?" Nicols asked, watching me.
"Fine," I replied. "Goose on my grave. That's all."
"Is that something we should worry about?"
"No. Just an old memory."
"Sneaking up on you?"
"Something like that," I muttered, walking toward the bedroom.
A flicker of energy caught my attention, and I stopped in the hallway. A sparkle—glitter on glass—coming from the bathroom. I set the Chorus in a defensive array, and pushed open the half-closed door with one finger. Light flickered from the bathroom mirror, a dancing knot of magick like a captive butterfly under glass.
I felt Nicols at my back. "What is it?"
"Not sure."
The magickal form in the glass didn't have an edge to it, nor was there any sort of signature attached to the flickering charge. It was just a small bundle of energy transfixed beneath the glass, free to twist and shine in its reflective prison. It was a static spell, an incantation caught inside the mirror. Without a regular infusion of energy, it would fade in a few days.
I walked toward the mirror, hand outstretched. Nicols sucked in his breath noisily behind me. The light spun faster as my finger, kissed with the focused fire of the Chorus, approached the glass. When I touched the glass, the mirror cracked. Nicols made even more noise, and I heard the safety-snap on his holster pop open.
"It's all right." I stepped back to the hallway. On the end of my finger, stuck as if it were glued, was an oversized playing card. The back of the deck was stamped with a multicolored Rose Cross, a rainbow pattern of petals arranged at the center. I plucked the card free, and turned it over so Nicols could see its face. Through a veil of geometric patterns, a soldier in green armor struggled with his golden chariot. Tiny cherubs, lashed to the ornate frame with wire and ribbon, were too slight, too ineffectual, to pull the heavy wagon.
"What is it?"
"It's a tarot card. From a deck designed by Aleister Crowley," I said. "It's the Prince of Swords."
He glanced at the broken mirror, trying to process what he had seen: a spark of light drawn through a piece of glass, transformed into a playing card by my touch. How were such things possible?
"It's a message," I said, ignoring the question on his face. "Left for me."
"From Doug?"
"No. From Pender."
He scratched the side of his nose. "Okay, I'm not up on the secret codes. Nor—" His eyes strayed to the broken mirror again. "—the ways you guys leave notes for each other."
"It means Pender knows who I am."
As if the words were a trigger, darkness striped across the face of the card. The corners curled inward, and I let go of the card. It didn't fall; it just vanished into a cloud of dirty vapor. Poof. Leaving nothing but a tiny rain of ash.
X
We would have been happy to find any hint of Doug's extracurricular hobbies: printed emails left carelessly in the trash, a desk calendar with circled dates and cryptic references, notes scribbled in the margins of his esoterica, secret society-style robes and objects of office hidden in a valise shoved in the back of the closet. What we found instead was the not-so-subtle suspicion that the place had been cleaned. The condo had been sanitized by Pender so as to remove any occult impropriety. Now, it was just the empty apartment of an energetic investment banker who spent most of his time chasing clients, spending money, and reading pop magic books. Nothing more.
After the dismal return on breaking the law at Doug's, Nicols insisted on getting something to eat. We repaired to the nearest 24-hour restaurant—Minnie's on the corner of First and Denny. Caffeine and starch. Post-midnight brain food.
I was having trouble sitting still as Nicols looked over the menu. My lower intestine was busy knotting itself over the fact that the hunt for Kat was going to have to be abandoned. My small window of opportunity had closed. The back trail was gone, and not only was Pender waiting for me, he was already removing what scant clues I had to go on. Doug's group had gone to ground. I didn't have the time to look under every rock.
No way to them. No way to her.
Seattle wasn't safe anymore. The psychic card in Doug's condo meant Pender had made contact with Paris. The Prince of Swords was the sign that he knew my history, knew what had happened between Antoine and me. He is coming. That was the message of the card.
My stomach took on some of the tension in my lower intestine, the Chorus clawing its way up through my torso. So close. She's so close.
"All right," Nicols said, jarring my internal confusion. "Let's hear it."
"Which?" Why was the Chorus nipping at me like this? They could be persistent, but never as overt as this. It had first started at the barn, and I tried to recall the sensation I had felt there. Hidden layers. The false reality of the surface, like the glassy mirror of a still lake. The sense of awareness underneath.
Could they hide something from me?
"Why you're running from Pender. What that card means. The whole story."
"Why?" Why were they pushing me?
"Because you're getting ready to bail on me. I step away to use the restroom, and you'll be gone when I get back. Just like that card. You keep looking out the window like you're expecting someone, like you're waiting for a signal to run."
"What if I am?"
"Where does that leave me?"
I exhaled, trying to remember the pranayama technique from yesterday morning. "Did I ever give you the impression that I needed a side-kick?"
"No, goddamnit," Nicols growled, "that's not what I'm talking about. Pender. What am I going to do about him?"
"Ignore him," I sighed painfully. "He's only interested in me."
His response was aborted by the arrival of the waitress with a pot of coffee. She managed to pour coffee and take our order with one eye closed as if she had woken up moments ago.
"I can't ignore him," Nicols said after she left. "He works for someone else. It took me a while, but it finally dawned on me that a guy like him—a guy in charge of making problems disappear—wouldn't do it because he's a generous spirit. He does magickal clean-up because that's his job, which means he's got a different chain of command." Nicols smacked the table with his thumb. "His interests aren't mine, aren't SPD's. He'd fuck us all in order to serve his real boss, wouldn't he?"
I shrugged, a "Wouldn't we all?" dismissal of his question.
"You can run and hide. I don't give a shit really. But I don't think it's Pender you're worried about. He's not the one who has the hooks in you. There's something else going on. But hey—" he spread his hands "—not my problem. I'll be quiet. Just sit here until my eyesight clears up, and everything goes back to normal."
I stared at him until he put his hands back on the table. "It's Pender's boss that has you spooked," he said. "And he's coming here, isn't he?"
I tried to repeat my earlier shrug of dismissal, but couldn't pull it off. The gesture turned into an involuntary shiver.
"Pender is a member of an organization known as the La Société Lumineuse," I started. "They're based in Paris, and their job is to watch. Watch and protect. Magick is supposed to remain . . . hidden. Outside of Paris, we call them 'Watchers,' and they've got agents everywhere. Their allegiances are to the organization, regardless of their local affiliations. Yeah, Pender would drive a car over you if it served his larger purpose. The Watchers are . . . both myopic and zealous." To put it generously.
"What about you? What are your allegiances?"
"Pender called me a veneficus during my interrogation. Latin, and it means both 'poisonous' and 'sorcerer,' depending on your need. Though, in my case, I think he meant both meanings. I'm . . . without a master."
"What does that mean? You're a rogue?"
I nodded. "I belong to no one—no coven, no order, no society. I've never met one of the Secret Chiefs, and I don't know the special handshake of the Mormon Church. I am a wild card—a child of chaos—and the Watchers don't like the unpredictability of adepts like me . . . especially when they used to belong to the family."
"They're after you just because you haven't paid your dues?"
"It's more complicated than that."
"I'm sure it is completely byzantine," he said, raising an eyebrow as he sipped from his cup. "So boil it down for me into something resembling a simple explanation."
I looked out the window. It had started raining again. A thin mist streaked the window, and the pools of water in the street were filled with yellow and green reflections. Minnie's was warm, and the smell of grease and burned meat was neatly hidden under an effluvium of gardenia and peppermint. Other than a quartet of young students on the other side of the triangular-shaped room, we were the only customers.
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. on a weeknight. If Antoine was on a flight from Paris already—even if he had gone straight to de Gaulle after hearing from Pender and caught the very next flight to Seattle—it would be midmorning before he arrived. At least.
Getting out of town was easy. One Suggestion to anyone driving north, and I could be across the Canadian border by the time Antoine arrived. Vancouver was large enough to confuse my trail. I could extend my head start there.
That wouldn't deter Antoine though. Not now, not when he knew my death had been faked. Hiding in Vancouver—or anywhere, for that matter—would just delay the inevitable. He'd never stop looking for me. Did I want to run for the rest of my life?
What other choices did I have?
Kill him, the Chorus insisted. Finish what he started. Cut a deal with the Watchers. Face them instead of showing your back. They twitched, sending a ripple of energy up my spine. Stop running.
And behind that suggestion lay the ever present lure of finding Kat, of returning the favor done to me a decade ago.
This isn't about revenge?
I tried to shake off Nicols' question from the car, but it was stuck in my head. Revenge? Was that all that drove me?
And Antoine? What do you think drives him? Is it any different?
It was like a whole section of the past had been overwritten. We had been seekers of knowledge, students of the arts who only sought to comprehend the luminous divinity of creation. Instead, we had become creatures driven by something as primitive as revenge. Had we drifted so far?
"A few years ago, I was in Paris. Studying to be a Watcher," I told Nicols, choking down these questions as if they were a glob of poisonous bile. "I had made the second rank—Journeyman—and fell in with one of the 'rising stars'—one of the golden children who was slated to ascend far in the ranks. Antoine Briande. He's from a long line of occultists—his father's father and that man's grandfather were both Watchers. Heresy and alchemy are an inextricable part of his heritage, the sort of pedigree that opens all manner of doors to an eager student. Me? I was just a mutt from the streets who showed promise and passion. We had nothing in common but, well, we discovered a common fascination."
"A woman," Nicols offered.
