Lightbreaker, p.9
Lightbreaker, page 9
"This the same thing she did to you?"
I hesitated before answering. My head pounded as the memory came on again, as if there was something pushing behind the tattered images. The ritual circle in the woods, the trees with their dark branches and whitened leaves, the other attendants at the ceremony, the light in her eyes and the light shining from holes in my chest as she removed her hand. The sequence was there—like it always was—but something felt off-kilter. Like I was watching a home movie in slow motion, and had finally started to notice the gaps between the frames.
Nicols took my hesitation as disinterest in answering his question. "That's the basis of the bone you've got to pick with her, isn't it? After ten years, I'm not buying that you're still carrying a torch for this woman. I saw you on the boat, saw how you came after Doug. It's not about being scorned or dumped. It's something deeper."
All the way to my core.
The roots of the Chorus were lost in the dark soil. What gave them sustenance? What fed their need? Was it something other than the soul energy they took?
"Yeah, you don't have to say anything. No one operates in a vacuum, Markham. Especially those who insist that they do. Give me some credit. I've been tracking loners for a long time." His eyes were bright and piercing like a hawk fixed on a lone rabbit out in the middle of a field. He was watching me in his own way, reading me as he read all those who came under his eye as a detective. I had to be careful not to give him reason to pounce on me. I had to be as honest as I could.
Why did that word seem so awkward? I looked at my hands as if there was some answer to be found in the patterns on my knuckles.
"My initiation into the world of magick was much like yours," I said. The words came slowly as if I was telling a story I didn't quite know, as if it were someone else's tale. "Sudden and unexpected. Your example earlier about fresh-faced football players is apropos. You're not equipped to play but you've got no choice. If you were just the rookie—the new guy with a couple of years high school experience—then I was . . . the water boy who got drafted into the game because all the other players were injured. I had no clue, and the whole experience probably should have killed me.
"Kat—Katarina Nouranois, her grandfather emigrated from Greece shortly after World War II—Kat was still a neophyte. She had no business attempting the ritual that night. She was overzealous, and things . . . got out of control. Before she could effect damage control—if she even knew how—the situation deteriorated, and I was abandoned. I had to figure out how to survive on my own."
He nodded and said nothing, just let the words spill out of me. It's an old saw of his profession: everyone wants to talk; everyone wants to confess their guilty secrets. Self-absolution in a private trinity of sinner, penitent, and priest.
"Every light casts a shadow," I continued. "All routes to enlightenment pass through an inversion of darkness. You have to travel both forward and backward, and some people get lost when they reach that border. They can't let go of their hearts and their minds. They can't destroy their egos. They still have fear. They reach the Abyss, take one look at the Guardian and the path beyond, and they're done. They give up."
"What happened to you?"
"I was left at the edge, completely naked and unprepared. I . . . fell, I guess, and someone caught me."
"Who?"
The Chorus hissed, uncoiling in my head. Blackness crawled up my spine, and I shivered involuntarily as the frayed edges of my memories filled in. "I won't say his name."
"Why not?"
"Names are powerful, John Nicols. They make objects real. They give strength to the imaginary."
"So if you say this name, this . . . Whatever . . . will be real?"
"I've seen far less be summoned and bound by the power of its name. I'm not about to give this being any more reason to find me. Remember what I said to you on the boat? Belief is a very big part of magick, John."
"It sounds like a very big pile of horseshit to me." He waved his hand. "Yeah, okay, I know. It's all a matter of subjectivity and perception. Bla bla bla. Whatever. Okay, so you met some mysterious stranger in the wood. What happened next?"
"Afterward, I wandered for a year, trying to figure out what had happened. I came back to Seattle, intent on finding Kat. But she had vanished; I couldn't find any trace of her. So I went east and tried to—" I swallowed the bile raised by the Chorus. "—educate myself. Survive the best I could."
"It looks like you did pretty well. Must have found the right teachers."
The Chorus flexed in my throat, heat on the back of my tongue. "I have an . . . unusual learning style. Very immersive."
He grunted. "I suppose that's to be expected. It's probably not much of a stretch to fit you with an obsessive personality profile."
There was no way he would understand what the Chorus was, and how they came to be in my head. Their knowledge became mine. It wasn't a matter of an obsessive focus at all; it was simply an act of absorption. I hadn't spent the last decade learning how to do magick but rather had spent it becoming magick. Each voice of the Chorus brought with it a wealth of arcane knowledge and occult instruction.
Nothing is ever lost; it is simply transformed.
"Occasionally I would find hints of Katarina. I would be in places where she had been recently, but I never got close enough to find a warm trail."
"So what changed?"
"I met someone who knew her." A random intersection of threads. I shook my head. The funny way the world was woven. "I broker antiquities for a living. It's a means to an end. I get to travel regularly, and I get to poke about in old libraries and the dusty corners of forgotten collections. My clients like to be anonymous. They appreciate someone who understands the nature of the transaction, who will grease the pipe from one end to the other. I have an office in Los Angeles, but I'm never there. An agency answers the phone, and takes care of my correspondence. I spend a lot of my time on the road, making deals and moving pieces.
"Most have esoteric or magickal histories, and some are black market items. Usually the buyer wants the acquisition to remain off the radar. I don't ask about provenance, nor do I care how the artifact comes available. I am an unaffiliated third party who can be trusted to move the object from point A to point B, who will never reveal the identity of the seller to the buyer, and vice versa. I have a reputation for good, clean work. I don't advertise; all my business is through personal references.
"What brought me to Seattle was an Assyrian statue. It used to be in the National Museum in Baghdad. But with the chaos in Iraq during the last decade, a number of pieces have been secretly removed in an effort to preserve them."
He raised his eyebrows, a number of questions half-formed on his lips.
"I'm under no illusions as to what I do, John. I know all the arguments about the preservation of cultural heritages, but do you just let these objects be destroyed because you can't protect them from chaos and barbarianism?"
He nodded curtly. "For the sake of argument, we'll pretend that I agree with you on this point."
"The statue was large enough that it couldn't be quietly smuggled into the US. Rather a certain amount of hands-on attention was necessary to ensure all the hurdles were properly cleared. It came on a boat from India, and there was a week's delay while the paperwork was processed by the Port of Seattle—this is all very standard, you realize—and I had a lot of free time on my hands. The buyer invited me out to his house one night to see his collection. It was almost an accident, really, but during the course of the evening's conversation it came up that we both knew Katarina."
"Really? Small world."
"It isn't, actually."
He gave me a thin smile. "I know. Rarely do people run into each other by accident. There's always something in their histories that brings about these happy collisions. An old detective I knew when I was younger used to say: 'There are no coincidences, only convergences.' " He sighed and looked out the window. "Now that I can see these energy lines, it seems even more true."
I acknowledged his point. "According to my buyer, there was a good chance Kat was still in Seattle. I decided to stick around for a while and see if I could find her."
"And when you find her?" His eyes, watching my expression now.
"I don't know," I said. The Chorus twitched behind my eyes, a motion contrary to the innocence of my statement. They had a plan. They had been waiting a long time to taste her. Take back what was stolen. That was the only way.
Nicols' extrasensory sight may have seen the flicker of light in my eyes. His face was unreadable—a mask of sagging flesh that gave nothing away except a long-suffering weariness with human frailties and self-deceptions. "This isn't about revenge?"
"Maybe," I admitted. Something moved in my gut like a giant sea creature rising toward the surface of the water. An untoward surge of stomach acid for such a noncommittal word.
Honesty.
"Okay, I appreciate that." He swirled the liquid in his cup and drained the last of the chocolate, his throat working.
My hands knotted themselves in my lap as the Chorus hissed at me. Do you really need his help? Is it worth the complications? His contacts with the police department could help me track Doug. His badge could grant me immediate access to places that I would have to otherwise force with magick and the force of my Will. Speed was an issue. Pender had begun to regret letting me go and, if he caught me a second time, he wouldn't make that same mistake again. I needed a shortcut, and Nicols was the closest thing I had.
No other reason? The Chorus tightened in my throat. I swallowed heavily, feeling their knot.
Nicols' hands moved toward his coat pockets, reaching for a cigarette, and then stopped. Someone walked past the front of our car and glanced at us, their eyes like phantasmal fire through the mottled condensation on the windshield.
The soul is a guttering flame sunk within our shells. Its light permeates the flesh, driving away the shadows that live in the heart, liver, and lungs. As the spirit is nourished by Knowledge and Reason—the reoccurring mythological symbols of enlightenment's sacred mysteries—the spark grows stronger, coughing and sputtering into a real flame.
The passage of Doug through Nicols' body had been like a burst of oxygen to a starved flame. A channel had been opened, and fuel had been given to his spirit. But he hadn't been damaged, not like Kat's hand on me. His initiation could be temporary. The pipe could be closed. He could return to the life of a guttering candle, burning so faintly that the back of his head would be forever in shadows.
He deserved a chance to make his own choice.
For a long time, I had lamented the loss of my innocence. Like the children in Blake's poetry, I wanted to be purified and left clean. But that could never happen. Not after what happened in the woods. Even if I stopped using magick, even if I sealed myself off and denied the mystical world, there was still a hole. Things could get out; things could get in.
In the end, I had adapted. It was as simple as that. I embraced the darkness as my path toward the light. It was the only way I knew.
One direction, one life. One purpose.
I needed to bury the past. In time, all things must be returned to the earth, planted deep so they can be forgotten. The natural cycle will transform them into something new. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: the cycle repeats over and again. I was cut off from myself, having been transformed that night into something different than I had ever expected to be. A part of me was taken, and wasn't it right that I got that piece back?
Kat was the link. She was the cosmological demiurge who had created me. She had ripped open the world, and shown me the darkness that lay behind the stars. I was going to be caught in this unfinished loop until I found her, haunted by what could have been until I closed the cycle and moved on. Take it back. End the exile. Complete your self.
The Chorus, always happy to remind me in the simplest language possible.
We all deserve the chance for something new, don't we? An opportunity to save ourselves. Sometimes we have to bury the past—bury our old selves—in order to be reborn.
Le roi est mort. Vive le roi. Such is the cyclical nature of all things. Such is the way the wheel turns. Kat had killed me, and I had to return the favor.
Two becoming one. I would remake my own world, once I was whole again.
IX
Back-tracking to Kat died as an option when the barn blew up, obliterating any viable trail. The only remaining option was to find Doug again. While dodging Pender and his surrogate eyes.
Doug would have run back to his real body. Without me on his trail, there was no reason not to return to the flesh he knew. If I was right, then Doug wanted access to his group's inner circle, and completing his rite of separation was the sort of act that came with a promotion. He had to make it back in order to show he was ready for advancement.
The magus at the farmhouse—the white-haired man—was one of Doug's masters, one of the elevated adepts of that group. He had possessed the gunman in the barn just as easily as I could put my hand in a sock. He knew the secrets that Doug so desperately sought.
Your attention is unwelcome. He had known who I was—maybe not my name, but he knew of me—and that meant someone had told him. Best guess was Doug. Just as soon as he had been grounded in his meat again. Who else knew? Had Doug told everyone in the group? Had he told Kat?
Would she know it was me? Doug might have plucked some of my identity from when I was binding him. He certainly could offer a physical description. But was it enough to warn her?
I had to find her before she made a decision about that knowledge, before she decided to run.
After getting off the ferry, Nicols made one call while we were waiting in the traffic. By the time we crawled one block along the waterfront—a deluge of vehicles from Pioneer Square was snarling all lanes along the water—he had Doug's essentials.
Traffic thinned out at Pier 70, and Nicols pointed at one of the tall buildings visible on the slope above the bay. "Washburne Tower," he said. "Upscale Belltown condominiums. Doug lives in number 1712. One bedroom condo."
"Drive past" I said. "Let's see who is watching."
"Pender, probably. Or someone who will report to him if we show."
"That won't be a problem."
"No violence."
I smiled at Nicols, a feral grin tainted by the black root of the Chorus. "Of course not."
Nicols merged into traffic flowing up the hill, and turned left onto Second Avenue at the top of the rise. The Washburne Tower was part of the urban modernization of Seattle's Belltown district—towering residential condominiums replacing the squat brownstones from a half-century ago. The building was a mass of dark angles and a thousand glass eyes staring sightlessly into the night. Sporadic squares of light suggested residents were either still awake or slept with their lights on, afraid of being suspended in darkness.
Nicols drove by the building. The ground floor was retail: a coffee shop, a wine bar, a dry cleaner, and a small deli barely big enough for its three coolers of wine and beer. The shops were all closed, lit by neon and recessed security lighting. A quartet of silver-edged doors sat beyond a tiny courtyard of heavily manicured shrubbery. A wide staircase led down to the street. The residential entrance.
Nicols angled his chin toward a cream-colored sedan parked across the street from the courtyard. Pender's eyes. A pale man with a thin face had his head back against the seat rest. The only thing he was keeping an eye on was the inside of his eyelids.
We circled the block, and Nicols parked on the opposite side of the building. A service alley cut into the geometric symmetry of the building, a narrow slit leading back to a loading area. We crossed the street like phantoms, and melted into the wan shadows of the alley. Sodium lights lit up a short loading dock and wire gate that led into the building's underground parking. Overhead, a pair of security cameras. A trio of green dumpsters and two recycling bins huddled tightly together like they were homeless seeking warmth in numbers, their rubber tops still wet from the recent rain. A card reader rose out of the ground next to the security gate, and a single unmarked door stood between the gate and the short tongue of the loading dock.
Nicols nodded toward the door, drawing my attention to the single keyed lock. "Can you magick it?" he asked.
I nodded, and the Chorus flowed into my palm. Hand against the lock, I felt them glide into the tight fit of the keyhole. I worked the muscles at the base of my fingers, undulating my palm and the Chorus went rigid, filling the empty space around the tumblers. A twist of my wrist to the right and the lock clicked open. We walked in like we owned the place, and Nicols shut the door gently behind us.
Nobody seemed to care. The dimly lit hallway was quiet; the only sound, other than our breathing, was the hum of distant HVAC. Nicols brushed past me, heading for the lobby. We found another unmarked door that put us at the back of the grand foyer, behind the bank of elevators. An open car gaped invitingly, and we slipped onboard like a pair of soft-shoed dancers.
