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  "Some of it," he murmured, "was lovely."

  —But memory can be relentless:

  He returned to the villa and searched the rooms for Celine, yelling her name all the while, and found her in the kitchen. She was on the floor, rocking back and forth, cradling the severed head of her six-year-old boy. The side of her own head was sunken and bloody. And she keened, keened, keened like an animal until she sank into his arms and finally died.

  He went out into the rain-lashed courtyard and screamed for Ashika, and her voice drifted back on the wind: Did you love them, Kai? I hope you did. I hope you love again. So I can find them and kill them with pleasure.

  "So you reappear," Mina said, and Kai forced himself back inside this moment, "and attempt to claim your old authority, and expect us to rally behind you? Things have changed, Kai. The world is not what it was seven hundred years ago. We are not what we were seven hundred years ago. And… there are suspicions." She seemed to struggle for a moment, looking for a softer way to phrase it: "You have become an object of suspicion."

  Behind her, the fire was dying out; he flung his hand toward it in annoyance and the flames blazed up again.

  "There is talk," Mina said slowly, "that you released Bakal Ashika. That you set her loose in this world."

  "Mina, that's utterly absurd."

  "I'm only reporting the rumors. To someone who's more out of touch than he realizes."

  "Who is suggesting this? Salik?" Mina's silence was her answer. "Is he saying this because he believes it or because he just wants to destroy me?"

  She jerked her head impatiently. "Does it matter?"

  He coughed, touched his sleeve to his mouth. "Bakal will want me first," he muttered. "Those twisted ideas she has about atonement. She'll arrange for me to atone in some bloody, spectacular fashion. Would that be proof enough, you think, I'm not in allegiance with her? Or would I still be an object of suspicion!"

  She didn't answer. Kai motioned at the fire again and the flames surged with new intensity.

  He wanted the old powers back; wanted them with a ferocity that unsettled and depressed him. So do we just give up, hand the world to Ashika? She thinks it is her due. Do we save ourselves by agreeing with her? Is that our only option?

  It is not. It is not. I will not accept that.

  Kai said, "If I told you that we can be restored to ourselves, to what we were, would you believe me?"

  "No one can soulcast that deeply into the Dream-lines," Mina said.

  "But if I was willing—"

  "Is Bakal truly the threat you think she is?"

  He was too stunned by the question to answer.

  Mina said, "She was imprisoned for over five hundred years. She has not attempted to release any of the others. Surely she would have done so by now… ?"

  This was a question that had troubled him as well. Ashika had gone to America. Following Innat, Kai knew, and yet he wasn't sure why. She was weaker and more vulnerable alone. They all were.

  "She didn't try to free them," Mina said, "because she can't. In her own way she's as crippled as Innat. She's confused and lost out there." Mina's eyes locked with his. "That's what the others are saying."

  "They're wrong. If she's weak, she won't remain so."

  She looked away.

  "Trust me, Mina. You know me better than anyone. And I know her better than anyone."

  "You've fallen from grace. I don't think you realize."

  "I realize—"

  "Your own Pact doesn't trust you. They won't follow you. They'll keep on living as they're living and they'll listen, and they'll watch; and if Bakal comes to power like you predict, they'll hide. Or die. Some of them might even join her, if she'll take them." Mina's eyes turned flat. "A lot of them just don't care anymore. We saved the world once, and for what? What's become of it? Or of us?"

  "Do you?" he said. "Care?"

  She didn't answer.

  "Mina," he said quietly. He stepped closer. "Mina." She wasn't looking at him. But neither did she move away from him. They stood there together, breathing together, as the wood turned to ash and the firelight died.

  She had been in this place, now, for four hundred years, her devotion to Del's Guardianship as single-minded as her devotion to pleasure had been, a long time before. He had been one of those pleasures. Hair falling over him like auburn rain. They'd been so young then, swallowed whole by palace life. So easy to forget the layers of society that churned beneath, studying you because they couldn't afford not to: their lives were balanced on your whims. They learned you, they learned your every nuance, and they despised you. While you played away at court, self-satisfied and oblivious. That kind of power was only interested in itself. Everything else fell away: unseen, unregistered. And then you were blind.

  "You are fond of her," Mina said suddenly. "Of Jessamy."

  It was not what he'd expected her to say.

  He said, "I've watched that family for centuries. It's only natural."

  Firelight flickered, shadows weaving and dancing on the tapestries.

  "You must step carefully, my prince. For so many reasons."

  He thought of Jess Shepard curled on the bed. He had assumed she was asleep, until her voice caught him in the doorway: Don't ever use magic on me again.

  "I know that," he said wearily. "Mina, I know that."

  Chapter Sixteen

  And when the house of cards that was his time with the Campbells came tumbling down, it happened swiftly and bloodily and without warning.

  * * * *

  Ramsey wanted to wipe that late-night encounter from memory and go on as if nothing had happened. But as soon as he came downstairs the next morning and caught eyes with his foster sister—she was leaning against the kitchen counter, plucking shell off a hard-boiled egg—he knew, in the space of one burning glance, that she was feeling too rejected, that it made her ashamed and angry.

  And he couldn't look at her without remembering her tongue in his mouth, her hair in his face, her bare, silken breast in his hand.

  They were civil to each other, like courteous strangers.

  That evening he practiced jump shots, hook shots, from different points on the driveway. The feel of the ball in his hands, the sight of it swooshing through the nylon mesh, calmed him a little.

  There was the squeak of the screen door opening,

  Dome's plump, friendly body appearing on the porch: "Ramsey? Run to the store for me?"

  The ball got away from him, bounced twice and rolled into grass. "Sure," Ramsey said.

  She gave him a short list of items and some money. And then paused.

  "You know," she said, as if clarifying something in her own mind, "you are a good kid."

  He thought of her long-legged, brown-haired daughter, straddling his body and pulling on his belt buckle.

  He turned his face away.

  "Thanks," he muttered.

  "So don't let them tell you any different."

  He walked down to Samson and Peninou, passing beneath tangled, shadowy branches that arced over the sidewalks. This was where the town thinned out, giving way to the woods.

  The convenience store's was the only lit window in the strip mall. The plus-size boutique, martial-arts academy, and town's only (and failing) sushi restaurant were locked up and empty. The clerk sat behind the counter with a magazine open in front of him. He glanced up as Ramsey entered, seemed to consider saying hello, changed his mind and returned to his magazine.

  Ramsey cruised the aisles. He picked up the chips and went to the refrigerated section at the back of the store. He tucked the chips beneath his arm and picked up some low-fat milk and a foil-wrapped brick of butter. He closed the door—

  —And found himself looking into the face of Paul Andes.

  "Hello, Ramsey," Paul said quietly.

  Paul's brown hair was rumpled and greasy, his eyes threaded with blood. He had his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his light cotton jacket.

  Ramsey nodded at him.
"Paul." He was surprised by the other boy's appearance—Andes was usually so styled, so golden-boy immaculate. But now the odor of unwashed skin and hair lifted off him. His arms wrapped round the groceries, Ramsey said, "Well. See you around." He tried to edge around him.

  Paul stepped in front of him.

  Over the other boy's shoulder, Ramsey could see the clerk, sitting behind the counter and turning a page of his magazine.

  Ramsey shifted his gaze back to Paul. "Something I can do for you?"

  An odd, eager light came into Paul's eyes.

  And he said, in that same quiet voice that didn't sound at all like the Paul Andes Ramsey had heard bellowing across the football field, or murmuring with Lauren as they sat together on the couch: "Did you guess it was me?"

  Ramsey tried to step round him but Paul moved with him, blocked him, as fluidly as any ballplayer. "I said," each word carefully enunciated, like a drunk man trying to sound sober, "I said, did you guess? Did you guess it was me?"

  "What the hell," Ramsey said in wonderment, readjusting his hold on the carton of milk that was threatening to slip from his grasp, "have you been smoking?"

  Paul's voice dropped an octave and something moved through his eyes, something dark and glittering and not sane. Ramsey felt his stomach twist in on itself.

  And then came the bloom of realization.

  The note that he'd ripped up and flushed away, and forced himself to forget.

  "I've seen it in dreams," Paul muttered. "These dreams, Ramsey, I'm having such crazy dreams—"

  "It's okay, Paul," Ramsey said quietly. He glanced again at the clerk, who remained engrossed in his magazine. "The dreams can't hurt you. The dreams—"

  Paul took his right hand from his jacket pocket. Ramsey saw the gun. It happened so quickly, so casually, Ramsey's first thought was that it had to be a toy.

  "The world will burn because of you," Paul whispered, "—so it's up to me to do this. I am not afraid. I am not afraid."

  The milk, the butter, the cellophane bag of salt and vinegar chips: they all slipped from Ramsey's arms. The carton made a loud, moist, thwacking sound as it hit the tile.

  That got the clerk's attention. He lifted his head and said, "Dudes—"

  Paul swiveled on his heel and shot him.

  He did it as casually as tossing a Frisbee. The clerk's head snapped back and he slumped off the stool, vanishing behind the counter. They heard the clumsy thump as his body hit the floor.

  Paul turned and aimed the gun at Ramsey.

  Ramsey didn't know anything about guns. He couldn't have identified the make and model of this one if his life had depended on it (which it doesn't, a wild little voice shrieked in the back of his mind, it doesn't because Paul will shoot you anyway). The barrel was looking straight at him, into him. He kept himself perfectly still, as if face-to-face with a wild predator that, at the slightest sign of movement, would leap and tear out his throat.

  Paul Andes just shot that guy—

  Paul Andes from the town's golden circle of athletes and rich, pretty kids, holding Ramsey at gunpoint, Ramsey the quiet loner with the much more fucked-up past? And so shouldn't this be the other way around? The shrieking, wild little voice in the back of Ramsey's mind wouldn't shut up. Aren't you supposed to be the one opens fire on his peers?).

  Paul Andes just turned around and shot that guy.

  Ramsey swallowed—tried to swallow—and said, "Paul. Dude. C'mon."

  "I have to do this," Paul said. "You have to understand. Nothing personal, Ramsey, but"—and again, the dark glitter in his eyes—"they will find you, they will devour you, they will plunge the world into a Dark, a Darker Age—"

  "Paul," Ramsey said, "Paul," the name banging around his skull like a caged hysterical bird.

  "—The world will crawl with disease," Paul said, "Oh such great disease, such decay, and the demons, oh the demons—"

  "Paul, please, listen to me, they're just dreams, just dreams—"

  "That's not true! Don't you understand that's not true?" The corners of his mouth were twitching. "People crucified on telephone poles up and down the highways. People bleeding from every orifice, people eating the brains of their children, people melting and twisting in the flames. People vomiting blood and shitting out their organs. Don't you know what you are? She's going to use you, Ramsey. She's going to use you! Don't you know what you fucking are?"

  The gun was trembling in Paul's hand. Ramsey was close enough to see the stubble that bristled along the boy's jaw, breathe the stink of the sweat that had darkened his T-shirt.

  Ramsey said, with all honesty, "No."

  But the voice at the back of his head whispered, He's right, the words like cold poison injected in his veins. He's gone crazy and he doesn't understand. But he's right. You know it.

  Paul gave a small nod. "I'm really sorry," he said, and there was a click as he pulled back the trigger, "but you have to die. Or the world will burn, Ramsey. It will all burn away."

  What happened next happened very quickly.

  Ramsey felt a blossoming deep inside him, something so cold it burned through him like hellfire. Whatever it was—whatever force—it ripped up and through his body and blasted out from him, and Paul's eyes went very wide as something unseen snatched him off his feet and slammed him against shelves of boxed sugar doughnuts and stacked rows of Pop-Tarts, and the gun went off in a whip-crack of a sound.

  —And Ramsey felt the world go away from him for a moment—

  —And he was on his knees, staring down at cheap speckled tile, and his shoulder was alive with pain.

  Paul was crumpled on his side, unconscious or dead, the gun on the floor beside him. Ramsey cried out. He scrambled to Paul's body and kicked away the gun, the way cops did in movies and TV. Paul still didn't move. Ramsey stood there, hunched over, one hand pressed to his right shoulder, liquid heat soaking through his army jacket. He watched the other boy until he saw his chest rise and fall and knew he wasn't dead.

  The clerk was, however.

  Splayed out on the floor between the counter (with its glassed-in shelf of lottery tickets) and the back wall (with its stacks of cigarettes), the clerk stared glassily up at Ramsey. There was no fear on his face, just a naked confusion.

  Ramsey snatched up the phone behind the counter, called 911. "Sir, sir, please calm down, I need you to calm down—" the operator was saying, but Ramsey could barely hear her. He rambled on until he was pretty sure he had said everything he needed to say, then let the phone hang off the counter so they could trace it if they had to. There was a blazing in his veins, licking the underside of his skin; he could not stay in here, it was much too hot in here, dead clerk behind the counter and maybe-dying golden boy crumpled amid boxes of chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts and Ramsey flung himself against the door, spilled out into summer night, air washing over him as he stumbled through the parking lot.

  His first instinct was to go back to the Campbells. He could not deal with police or ambulances with red sirens flashing, but he was pretty sure he could deal with Dorrie. She would calm him, would explain to him what had really happened, because surely he had not just fought off Paul with some invisible force blasting through him like he was a character in a comic book, surely he had not done that, for God's sake, it just wasn't possible.

  He reached the sidewalk, turned in the direction of home.

  Then paused.

  The street was abandoned. On the other side, the woods began: dense and tangled and darker than the shadows that enclosed them. But up behind the little strip mall, a scattering of houses. Someone had surely heard the gunshot… ? But there was no sign of activity or alarm. Silence lay on the neighborhood like fallen snow.

  And then Ramsey heard the footsteps behind him.

  He whirled, felt the scattered beat of his own heart, expected Andes to be there with the gun again, like the monster in a horror movie that just kept getting up and getting up again—Where was the gun? What had happened to the gun? Ramsey could
n't remember. But there was no one behind him—not Andes—not anybody. He was staring at an empty expanse of parking lot, the dark facade of the martial-arts school, the clothing boutique, summer dresses hanging off the plus-sized mannequins in the window.

  But then the footsteps sounded again, distinct and unmistakable in the clear evening quiet. Pain beat inside Ramsey's right temple. He pressed his hand—palm warm and sticky with his own blood—to his head.

  The footsteps sounded across the pavement, stopped beneath a streetlight.

  Ramsey trained his gaze on that patch of light and sidewalk.

  "Help me," he whispered.

  A figure was forming inside the pool of artificial light, forming tall and slender and female. Ramsey drew closer. The pain in his shoulder no longer seemed significant.

  The woman on the sidewalk said, "Come here. Let me see you."

  Ramsey stopped. Her voice was familiar but wrong.

  Not the singer's voice.

  Not Asha.

  The woman said, "Let me find you. Tell me where you are."

  He took another step towards her, was about to speak when he noticed the color of her eyes—dark blue, navy blue—and recognition slammed home. She was the woman from his drawings and the tarot card, the Priestess and the Falconess, while Death rode his pale horse and the sky burned just like Andes had said it would and it was all because of him—

  —Him and the green-eyed thing that clawed and ripped at him as they fought in a realm outside this one, and the monster was tearing him apart but he couldn't get away from it, he was bound, so bound, and from somewhere far below he heard the rattling of a chain and understood it to be his own—

  "No," Ramsey murmured.

  —But he was tumbling through cold dark space, teeth ripping into him and nails sinking deep into him and salty coppery blood rising through his mouth—

  —OH IT HURTS IT HURTS SO MUCH—

  Do you know what you are?

  "No," Ramsey said. Speaking to her, this woman, this presence, standing in the ghostly pool of streetlight. "Stay the fuck away from me. I was promised my release, do you understand? Do you hear me? I was promised."