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  "It's circling high above you," Jess continued. "It's watching you. It's been watching you for years."

  "Never mind that. The boy, Jess. Where is he? Can you find him?"

  Her face twisted and she gave a small cry. Her hands rose up, carved shapes in the air.

  "Jess," he said, and caught her wrists in both his hands, held them as she strained to break away. He was suddenly, alarmingly aware of her long lean body in the flimsy cotton nightshirt. "Jess," he said. "You don't need to write it or paint it. You can just reach inside yourself and say it—"

  "Sold for the drug," Jess muttered. "The other one, too. Lizardking. Poppy sold him for the drug. To be killed in the Maze while they watch on the screens. Because that's entertainment. That's entertain—"

  "Wake up and say it." He resisted the urge to shake her, to keep the anger from his voice. He was so tired of this. "Where is he? Where is Ramsey?"

  And he saw her eyes clear as she came back to herself, as her dreamtime knowledge merged with her waking life. He felt, despite himself, a pulse of satisfaction. She was learning. She was growing.

  "San Francisco," she said. Jess Shepard's eyes were wide, her voice tinged with wonder. California, he thought. A desert state. "He's in San Francisco."

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It felt strange to punch in Gabe's number, like sending transmissions to an alien planet. He wasn't in. She meant to leave a message on his voice mail, except her voice curled up and died on her. He would only hear the gaps between her words, the things she was not telling. If you want to keep your secrets, he had once told her, exasperated, when they were arguing over something now long gone from memory, keep your secrets.

  Kai had rented a two-bedroom suite on the sixteenth floor of an old Nob Hill hotel. The marble fireplace, landscape paintings, patterned silk-upholstered furniture, were too early-European for her own tastes. But she saw how it suited Kai—how, when they stepped through the door, he stretched and rolled his shoulders and seemed to breathe easier.

  She had asked him point-blank, "Just how wealthy are you?"

  "I've been in this world for over seven centuries, Jess." He was sweeping back the drapes, studying the view of the city. "That's a lot of time to learn about wealth. How to make it, lose it, make it again. Whether you use magic or no."

  "So are all the Summoners like you? Rich like you?"

  "No. Some of them don't care."

  "But you care."

  "I went from utter luxury," Kai said, "to traipsing around Europe in the Dark Ages with little more than my horse. Believe me, I learned to care." He nodded to the view beyond the window, the buildings and hills, the glimpse of bay. "I made some wealth here," he said absently.

  "The Gold Rush?"

  He nodded. "The ships that delivered food and merchandise to people who came here, stayed here, built a city. Some of those were mine."

  Now, she heard him moving in the living room. He seemed restless and distracted in a way that unsettled her, a bleakness gathering in his eyes. She turned her mind away from him, picked up the telephone and called Chelle.

  "Getting out of the city to clear your head." Chelle's voice was sharp. "So is it clear yet? What is going on with you?"

  "I've been—"

  "You don't even know what happened to him. Do you?"

  "Something happened to Gabe?" Her voice went thin and high. "Chelle, what happened? Oh my God—"

  "He's in a coma."

  "What?"

  "He went out with some friends to party in the Hamptons, drank too much and tried to drive home. And his fucking friends fucking let him. There were two other guys in the car with him, they're fine, some broken bones. Thank God. Thank God. He could have killed them. He could have killed someone else, plowed into some kid—vehicular homicide, involuntary manslaughter—assuming he ever wakes up."

  "So he's—" She didn't know how to finish the sentence. Her throat went tight.

  Silence on the other end.

  Then: "I don't know, Jess. He's stable. He's stable. But he isn't waking up."

  "I can't—" Jess took in a breath. "I don't know when I'm coming back, Chelle. I got caught up in something. I can't leave until it's finished."

  "And you can't tell me what it is?"

  If you want to keep your secrets, keep your secrets.

  "No," Jess said.

  "Are you with someone?"

  Jess paused.

  "Jess."

  "Yes. I am. But it's not anything—"

  "He is my brother, Jess. He got fucked up that night because he was fucked up over you, you realize?"

  "I never betrayed your brother," Jess said evenly. "It's not like that."

  "It's the guy who came into the bar that night. Isn't it?"

  She remembered: the across-the-room glimpse of Kai on the stairs, Chelle plucking the cherry from her Manhattan, votive candles flickering light on her face. It seemed a lifetime ago.

  "Jess—"

  "It's not like that," Jess said. "Whatever you're thinking is wrong. Believe me."

  "And if Gabe wakes up and asks after you? What do I tell him?"

  "Tell him something came for me," Jess said, "like I told him it would. Like I always knew it would. Tell him I genuinely loved him. Tell him I'll see him when I can."

  A silence.

  "Play safe," Chelle said, and hung up.

  Jess stared at the bedroom wall, cradling the phone in both hands. People moved into your orbit, moved through it, away. She had accepted this long ago.

  She thought of Gabe in a hospital bed, gone deep inside himself, beyond anyone's reach. There were things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to explain herself, defend herself. She wanted to talk about how you were supposed to share your feelings. Confess. Go on talk shows, go to a shrink, write a memoir. Jess had never shared that impulse. An over-examined life seemed just as static and worthless as an unexamined one. But if you acted, if you made things happen, then sooner or later your life would change. That's what painting had always been for her: an act, perhaps even a revolutionary one, that could rescue her from shame and secrets and loneliness. Her paintings were her confessions, and she had never felt the need to reveal herself in any other way. What makes you think you even want to be known? he had asked her. But she had always assumed that if he looked at her paintings closely enough, he would know everything. As if it mattered now.

  * * * *

  "It's Gabe," she told Kai. "He was in a car accident." They were sitting on the terrace, a bottle of sake on the table between them. The night air was soft on her skin, the city dropping beneath them: hills rising and falling like breath, all the way down to the Bay, the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge strung across black water.

  "He's in a coma," Jess said.

  He was staring into the distance, his eyes hooded. But then he turned towards her, and she saw him gather himself out of his own thoughts.

  Kai said, "Persist with the teachings, and you'll be able to go back and help him."

  "If the magic changes me enough, you mean?"

  He turned his sake cup in his long fingers. "Yes."

  "What am I changing into?" Jess said. "Like you?"

  "Not quite. But if you go deep and far enough into the magic—" He stared at the sake cup. Again, she sensed him slipping off into his own mind, far away from her, from anyone.

  "Kai," she said quietly.

  The sound of his name seemed to startle him. "Sorry," he muttered. "The magic changes you. And those of us who go deeply into it, as you have the potential to do—"

  "So I could become one of you." Jess felt oddly detached, like a scientist probing an interesting new artifact. "A Summoner. With the extraordinary life span."

  He looked at her carefully, setting the cup back down on the table. He leaned toward her. She sensed everything he had not yet told her swelling against the membrane of his silence. He said: "You would pass over into a whole new kind of existence. Your life in New York. Your friends there. Your c
areer. You would have to die to all of that. It doesn't come easy. It's amazing, how hard and fast we cling to the things we think define us. But that life, that identity, would peel away from you, one skin, one layer, at a time." He paused, then said. "You would lose the ability to have children. I don't know if that's important to you."

  She looked at him blankly. "The magic makes you sterile."

  "Children bind you into time," Kai said. "The passing of generations. When you step half out of time like we do—No."

  "I always assumed I would," Jess mused. Her gaze slipped past him, to the spires of a church across the street below. "At some point. Have a child."

  "The more you feed the magic, the greedier it gets. It wants your time, your attention, your love. There's no room in there for a child. Not much room for anyone."

  "It sounds lonely."

  "Your definition of loneliness changes, along with everything else."

  "Kai—"

  "It might not be necessary," he said, looking at her in the half-light that spilled through the glass doors. "Most people with Sajae magic, who learn to use it in some form or other, stay safely enfolded in their humanity. It might be that way with you."

  "But you don't think so."

  He shrugged. "I make no predictions."

  He took something from his pocket and placed it on the table between them. It was a polished stone, a tiger's eye, smooth and gleaming. "This is for you," Kai said. "It's a guardian-stone, a kind of talisman. A spell."

  "A spell," Jess echoed. She touched it gingerly, as if it might burn her. She picked it up and cupped it in her palm. "It's a stone."

  "When you're lost, throw it as hard as you can into the darkness. And someone will come from the Dreamlines to guide you. A ghost, most likely, although sometimes it's a demon."

  "A demon?"

  He gave a wry smile. "Just a little one."

  "Why would I need this? I have you."

  Kai took his gaze away from her.

  "Kai," she said. She drew breath. "I'll do whatever I need to do. But I'd like to think I still had choices. That everything isn't just… predestined." She wasn't sure exactly what she meant by this. But she could feel the weight of the things Kai was keeping from her, threatening to press down and smother them both.

  "You have choices," Kai said abruptly. "We always have choices." He stood and picked up the sake bottle and went back into the suite, sliding the door behind him. Jess looked after him, thinking again of that image in her mind: the beach, the tidal wave. She closed her eyes. She could feel it now, crashing over her, cold and fierce and obliterating.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  It was like thunder. Their music rose and hovered, filled the air, exploded. Lucas didn't feel that he was making music so much as he was caught inside the pulsing heart of it. They had always played well, but they had never played like this before: the music from and of them and yet not. It was its own entity. It used their flesh, their bodies. If Lucas lifted his hands from his guitar strings he suspected it might rip them apart.

  The crowd was loving it.

  They crowded the orchestra-pit-turned-dance-floor of the old renovated theater; they filled the tables that slanted up through the shadows, they spilled through the doors in the back and milled and lounged and listened in the hallway just outside. As the lights flashed and shifted Lucas could look out and see people holding each other, swaying and jumping to the music, the whites of their eyes gleaming like those of creatures in the bush. Empty water bottles littered the tables. Lucas knew that if he got off the stage and moved through the crowd (and they would love that, they would eat him all up), he would see the odd, otherworldly glint of jax-marks: decorating wrists and throats and naked backs and bellies. He would see heaven-starred, bombed-out gazes turning to him with looks of love and devotion and revelation.

  Come to the desert.

  Join the festival.

  Come drink of the bloodangel.

  Asha's fans. Or her children, as she liked to call them (and she said it without any irony whatsoever, at least as far as Lucas could tell).

  In moments like this, Lucas was tempted to think of them as his children, too.

  They were deep into the final song now, Asha's voice howling up through the octaves. She hit the high note and held it and as the moment stretched on he saw the shadow again, as he sometimes did when they were on stage, saw it rise from Asha's body and hover around and over her, saw it slowly unfurl its long whip of shadow-tail—

  The moment snapped.

  Asha's voice cut out, the lights came down.

  Lucas backed up a step, another step. He could feel the audience, out there in the dark, their collective suspended breath. "Come to the desert," Asha called into the microphone. Her voice rang and boomed. "All my children. Come to the Bloodangel."

  The darkness erupted with screams and applause.

  * * * *

  Afterwards, he found a quiet corner backstage to have a smoke before heading back to the chaos of the dressing rooms. He pulled smoke into his throat and lungs, gazed disdainfully at his shaking hands until he had steadied them enough to perform surgery.

  "Intriguing show."

  The voice came rolling down the corridor.

  Lucas pulled away from the wall, looked in the direction of the voice.

  "Hey there," he called.

  No response.

  He saw movement at the end of the corridor and for a moment thought it was his own reflection in the mirror that hung there until the same voice came again: "Interesting music. Interesting singer," and its owner stepped into view, boot heels rapping on concrete. Lucas squinted through cigarette smoke, shadow.

  He said, "So who the fuck are you? And how the fuck did you get back here?"

  The man smiled and produced a card between his first and second fingers (they were unnaturally long, Lucas saw, with silvery nails). He presented the card to Lucas.

  "The name is Salik. Your singer knows me. We go back a very long way."

  He took the card without looking at it, careful not to let the other man's skin graze his own.

  Salik said, "I'll have one of those, if you don't mind."

  He could never refuse someone's request for a cigarette; he had bummed so many in his lifetime he couldn't risk the karma. He handed Salik a Lucky and was about to lend him his lighter when he saw the cigarette between the man's lips, already lit.

  "The thing about a creature like Asha," Salik said, and Lucas found himself paying attention, "is that she gets lonely. And even homesick, from time to time, which some like myself might consider ironic. Given what she did." He exhaled smoke. "The home, the city, that they turned to sand."

  "The Labyrinth," Lucas murmured.

  "Ah." The man looked pleased. "So she has educated you, at least a little?"

  "Perhaps a little. Who are you?"

  "I used to be important," Salik said. "When I was a child, I studied alongside the prince himself, played with him in the royal courtyards. Now I'm just a dealer."

  "Dealer of what?"

  "Certain pleasures. So I hope you'll take advantage of my invitation." He gestured to the card in Lucas's hand. "Bring the singer. Or come alone. Either way."

  "Why come at all?"

  "Something has rather miraculously come into my possession. If I'm not mistaken, but I don't believe I am, I'd be honored to make you a gift of it." The black eyes flared a little.

  Lucas said, "And if you are, as you say, mistaken?"

  "Ah, then." Salik hunched his narrow shoulders, a parody of a shrug. "You will still enjoy yourself. I, too, can put on some good entertainment."

  Lucas stubbed out the cigarette and turned from Salik's grinning face.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Everywhere she went, the city was hollow with his absence. Whatever pulse of him that had drawn her there was gone. Jess went through the Tenderloin, Haight-Ashbury, the Mission: places where young faces, lost faces, found each other, gathered. None of tho
se faces belonged to her boy. She mindcast through the streets as far as she was able, searching for that flicker of presence, that taste, but there was nothing. Only a void of dead air.

  But every time she left the hotel, it was like stepping into a new world. She heard fragments of conversation coming from what should have been way beyond earshot (three girls were talking heatedly in Italian as they waited for the light to change, a middle-aged couple at the end of the block were discussing a Russell Crowe movie); and her vision seemed jacked up, amplified. The colors blazed; cars and buildings and people stood out in sharper detail. She felt removed to a place outside the edges, looking in, and yet she also felt plugged into the world like never before, as if it wasn't moving around her but through her, and she was tasting it from the inside for the very first time.

  * * * *

  When Jess returned to the hotel suite, the Do Not Disturb sign was hanging on the door. She let herself in.

  Her hands went to her stomach, as if she'd been kicked there.

  Kai was kneeling in meditation, his head thrown back, his arms loose at his sides.

  He was also levitating off the ground, his head just inches from the high ceiling. His eyes were closed and he seemed oblivious to her presence. She heard someone whispering his name, over and over, then realized that voice was her own.

  Kai's suspended body revolved slowly towards her.

  He opened his eyes.

  His sockets were filled with molten light, a glowing deep amber. It was as if someone had opened up his skull and filled it with flame. He lifted his hands. His skin was luminescent.

  Jess backed into her own room and shut the door.

  * * * *

  "What you saw," Kai said. "You shouldn't be alarmed. It might appear dramatic, I know, but it's fairly routine."

  She had called room service, even though she had little appetite. But it seemed she was taking more and more comfort in mundane rituals: guiding the waiter inside the room, signing the check, wishing him a pleasant evening. Kai emerged from the other bedroom, a folded map beneath his arm. He reached for the glass of cabernet she held out to him, the half-light downplaying the odd shade of his eyes, the glint of his fingernails.