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  He sipped the tea.

  He never expected to talk to Jessamy again.

  * * * *

  He was living in Barcelona, dealing in a range of antiquities and rare books, drawn to old things, old beauty. He was amused at how some things, like some people, found their way back to you, winding down through space and time like a dog searching out a beloved owner. A saber he'd purchased in Peking in 1700 and given away years later had come into his Barcelona shop at the end of the last century, wrapped in bubble paper, from a bespectacled young man who wanted to go to California and start up a dot.com. A first edition of Childe Harold that the poet himself had given him those years in London, and that Kai had sold off with his other belongings in one of his sporadic "deaths" (after which he reinvented himself somewhere else, in an ever-shifting game of identity). He stumbled across the book two hundred years (and one more death) later, in a dusty little bookshop in Rome, and when he saw his old name inscribed inside the front cover he felt his own ghost reach out from those Regency days, stroke his throat with unseen fingers.

  Other objects, too: a silver Byzantine goblet he had favored for years, a minor Van Gogh in a scratched wooden frame, a fur jacket a soon-to-be-legendary stage actress had left behind in his Paris hotel room.

  They showed up in museums, catalogs and auctions, private collections, eBay. When you lived as long as he had you could not afford sentiment, nostalgia, or else the gathering weight of your memory would crush you (as others of his kind had discovered), but as his memory broke apart over the years, a book or art object or faded sepia-toned photograph could bring a lost shard of time into focus. Yes, I was there, I watched them storm the Bastille. My friend Alexandre was imprisoned and beheaded for some senseless bullshit reason. I had an affair with a married woman named Marie-Thérèese, who had a strawberry birthmark above her right breast, and when they came for her as well I smuggled her out of the country. He would see the thing—the Chinese saber, the book of poetry, the goblet—he would hold it if he could, let the memories pass through him, associations of a life now lost. And then he would put it back, give it away, or sell it: release it into the world and idly wonder when he'd meet up with it again. His own treasured collection was not one of things, but lives—men he had been, roles he had played—and his recent, deepening wish to remember them was, he supposed, a sign of aging, a sharpening awareness of his own mortality. The Summoners lived long—sometimes very long—but not forever.

  He had been aware of Jessamy Shepard from the day she was born. When he was capable of it—the strength of his abilities fluctuated—he would look in on her life through dreamshaping or remote viewing. He went to Cape Town to find her, to give her some comfort if he could, and also to satisfy his own curiosity. To see her in the flesh. Her mother, Rachel, had been a gentle woman, highly intelligent, but weak, dominated by her father and her brother.

  And as another century moved toward its end, spinning out the fears of doom and apocalypse characteristic of such periods, he thought back to Jess and to that moment when he had actually (seriously?) considered taking her with him to Spain. A foolish impulse, and he was glad he'd overridden it. Still, he found himself wishing he had taken something of hers—a little talisman—although the thought of what that could have been (the plastic watch on her wrist?) made him smile and shake his head at himself.

  But after Cape Town, he was restless again. He closed up his shop, sold the Barcelona apartment, stored some of his things in the house outside London and gave away everything else. He went to the Caribbean, traveling through the islands, pausing unexpectedly at St. Martin when he became involved with a woman there, an expat named Celine who had a six-year-old son. And he found himself playing father after all.

  Until Ashika found them.

  Until Ashika changed everything.

  * * * *

  Now, in New York, he had taken a suite at the Four Seasons. He dropped his card-key on the table, walked through the sand-and-bronze rooms to the terrace. He stepped outside, sliding the door shut behind him. The air swept his face. He looked down into the city. Once, he had stood in this same spot and watched horses and carriages. That had been a time when a young and provincial New York worshiped the great European cities. Now it worshiped itself.

  Kai took off his gloves, took a pocketknife from his coat pocket. The knife was a pretty thing with an ivory handle. He hesitated for only a moment before slashing open his left palm. He lifted his hand, turned it over. Blood dripped onto the stone. "Shemayan," he called.

  Sending his voice, his thoughts, out into the darkness. "Shemayan."

  The air slipped over him. But there was something else that edged the wind now: a smoky, spicy scent, a hint of something darker than the shadows. His blood began to disappear before it hit the stone, as if the air itself were drinking it in. Kai watched as a new shadow formed, grew into the shape of a man as tall as himself. The shadow-hands reached up to the shadow-head, drew aside the shadow-hood.

  Kai said, "Welcome back, my friend."

  Shemayan's face was pale as moonstone, as gently luminescent. His features were sharp and thin, his eyes hooded in deep sockets. Colorless eyes. Death had leached all color long ago.

  —Greetings, Your Highness.

  The words were diffident; the tone was not.

  —The Pact is broken. The others no longer trust you.

  Kai drew his wounded hand against his chest. "I found her," he said.

  —My prince. You must reunite your Pact. You can't accomplish this alone.

  Kai ducked his head in acknowledgement. But he did not want to talk about the group of spellcasters with whom he had crossed into Summoning, all of them bound to each other through blood and deep magic. Kai knew that the Dreamlines that linked them, and gave them greater power as a group than they possessed as individuals, had been thinning for years.

  And instead of dealing with the problem, he had turned a blind eye, dropped out of the Dreamlines entirely.

  —They will think it was you. You've been too aloof, too enigmatic, for too long. You were unwise, my prince.

  "We all came undone," Kai said, the words painful, "in one way or another. We neglected the rituals. We broke away from one another. The Pact turned corrupt a long, long time ago."

  —Regardless. You are easy to accuse, and you made yourself more so.

  "Yes," Kai admitted, and then, "She grew up beautiful, Shem. You'd be proud."

  —The damage?

  Kai paused. He thought of Jessamy's mother, Rachel, the placid, productive life she had led. "That depends, I suppose. If circumstances were different—"

  —But circumstances being what they are. She's cut off from her own nature.

  "Our nature. Yes."

  Shem's mouth pursed in distaste. Even now, he was reluctant to concede that a descendent like Jess Shepard had the right to her own humanity.

  —I sense your plan. It is right. Take her to the creature Del.

  Kai was quiet for a moment, his gaze shifting beyond Shem to the near-distant silhouette of the Empire State Building, rocket-shaped tip blazing with light. He was surprised by the weight of his own reluctance. The same plan that had seemed inevitable a few days ago now seemed dangerous, foolhardy.

  He didn't say anything; he didn't have to; Shem could sense his second thoughts.

  —There's no other choice. Time moves quickly, princeling, and the woman herself is of small consequence. It is the Binding we need.

  "The Binding would be useless if she's too traumatized to—"

  —You don't think you're being just a little condescending?

  A wry smile twisted the colorless mouth. Only Shemayan could have addressed him as princeling without giving offense; likewise, only Kai could have so openly questioned Shemayan's judgment.

  —I suspect that my child is made of strong stuff. Take her to Del.

  "Del can't be trusted."

  —He will help her for his own reasons.

  "Which is what co
ncerns me."

  —The woman must be tested sooner or later, my prince. If she doesn't have it within her to handle a trickster like Del, then we are all lost, and can spend these last days wallowing in our little lusts and hedonisms.

  Again, the pale smile.

  —So we might as well know now.

  Kai absorbed this in silence. Shemayan was right, of course; he always was. In his time he had been the greatest mind in the Labyrinth, employed by the king himself to tutor the royal sons. As an impatient child-prince, Kai had not liked his tutor: thought him too cold, sardonic, lacking emotion and passion. Shem wasn't fun to be around, like the jesters and entertainers; he wasn't stylish like the courtiers, or romantic like the poets. But then the slavegirl-demon and her "children" had come with their dark blazing wrath, rampaging through the city, leaving it broken and smashed. The actors and courtiers and poets were lost, scattered or killed, as were Kai's father and brothers. It was Shemayan who had saved him. It was Shemayan who had saved so many of them.

  Now, on this twenty-first-century Manhattan terrace, Kai ducked his head in acknowledgement and surrender. "I'll take her to Del."

  —Bakal Ashika is out there even now, my prince. Gathering strength and energy. Soon she will release her children, and she will be powerful again. And they will seek to complete what they started so many centuries ago.

  "I know," Kai said.

  He felt the blood from his hand soaking through his shirt, warm and moist against his skin.

  —Save the woman if you can. But if her life must be rendered forfeit, you must not stand in the way of that. We all pay our price in one way or another.

  He paused.

  —As I did. As you did.

  "She's an innocent," Kai said.

  —Not for long. Make me proud, my prince.

  Shem's eyes turned flat and hard.

  —Both of you.

  He folded himself into the shadow, disappeared.

  And Kai was alone on the terrace, with the wind and the skyline and the drifting sounds of traffic. Loneliness shafted through him, cold and clean as moonlight. It was always like this following a Contact, as if the honed awareness of his solitude was part of the price to be paid, along with the wound.

  He glanced at his hand, opened and closed the fingers.

  There were things he could have said, but hadn't. He never did. Things like: I miss you. My friend. My mentor. It was not the kind of thing to be given voice, by either of them.

  One other thing he could have said, there on the stone-and-cast-iron terrace pitched seventeen stories high in the New York night. I could fall in love with her. The idea of saying that to Shem—to anyone, but particularly him—was unthinkable.

  It's forbidden, I know, and wisely so. But I could fall in love with her.

  Chapter Eight

  Ramsey Doe

  Dearmont, Minnesota

  The boy was flying.

  Sunlight shattering over him as he skimmed the iron railing, body leaning into perfect balance, harmony, and then he was in the air, trees shivering their leaves at the edges of his vision; and then the cra-ack of impact as pavement flew up to the board and Ramsey Doe, fifteen years old, was gliding, smooth, standing easy on the Tony Hawk as it took him to where tarmac met grass, to where Abe and Tim waited on the wrought-iron bench, Abe's own set-up flipped over by his feet.

  "Nice, bro," Abe said.

  Ramsey grinned and joined them on the bench.

  A midsummer's afternoon: the light slanting low in that way he liked, mellowing out the sky, burnishing grass and trees and the red-and-yellow metal of the kids' jungle gym.

  "… Swimming with the dolphins," Tim was saying. Ramsey could tell he relished the phrase. Tim used it again, tilting his broad, ruddy face in Ramsey's direction.

  "You interested in swimming with the dolphins, my brother?"

  Once a month Tim visited his older brother in Detroit and came back with several CD cases filled with ecstasy, the pills arranged and pressed beneath layers of Kleenex. It made him very popular at the middle-to-affluent suburban high school they attended.

  "Nah," Ramsey said. "Not today."

  They walked out of the park, down O'Henry, past ranch and split-level houses. A beagle, tied to a front-yard oak, barked at them and leaped against his leash.

  And then Tim said—as Ramsey had known either he or Abe finally would—"So what's the deal with Lauren? You think of her like a sister yet?" The grin on his face as he said this suggested the impossible nature of such a thing. Lauren Campbell, with her dancer's (now ex-dancer's) body and waist-length river of hair, her full-lipped mouth and the small perfect mole beneath her right eye.

  "Lauren," Ramsey mumbled. He stepped on his board, pushed off, wheeling over the sidewalk cracks and bumps. Abe yelled at him to wait. Ramsey only grinned and stepped up the pace.

  * * * *

  The Campbells lived in a renovated Victorian near the city limits, where the suburbs bled out into fields and the woods opened out onto the interstate highway. You couldn't see the highway from the Campbells' property, but Ramsey had dreams about it. Stark deep-sleep visions of half-starved dogs barking at him from the woods, as some unseen enemy hunted him down the swath of concrete. The more he tried to run, the more he realized the weight of his own shackles, the long chain dragging out behind him.

  Ramsey had been with this family for eight months now. He was slipping up, thinking of this place as home instead of what it truly was: a living situation, not his first and not his last. Because these situations never lasted. Sooner or later something changed, and the family ejected you: sometimes with tears and apologies, sometimes with naked relief.

  His foster mother was in the living room, reading.

  "Hey," he said. He saw the gleam of her crucifix against her freckled collarbone.

  "Hey," Dorrie said. "John gets home at seven. So dinner's at half-past."

  They all ate together, almost every night, sitting round the table like one of those families on TV.

  "Cool."

  "There's a letter for you. On the hallway table."

  "Cool."

  Ramsey tended not to keep in touch with people—tended not to get close to begin with. But he was surprised by the number of people who kept in touch with him. He picked up the letter en route to the stairs. But then Dorrie said, "Ramsey," and he doubled back to the living room doorway.

  Dorrie had closed her book, marking her place with her finger. She was looking at him with a troubled expression.

  "About Lauren," she said. "I know that since she got back, she hasn't been—She hasn't been very welcoming to you—"

  "It's okay," Ramsey said.

  Girl comes home from ballet school with her knee ripped up and her dreams stripped away, finds some bookworm skate-punk foster kid embedded in her house, her family, her life, as if he had every right to be there. He wasn't sure what Dorrie had expected. Lauren didn't owe him anything.

  "She'll come round," Dorrie said, "just give it time, just don't take it personally."

  And in that moment, Ramsey felt it: that strange, hot flash of clarity that sometimes overcame him, whispered through his blood, his bones, pulsed up behind his eyes and altered the way he saw the world. He looked at Dorrie and grasped (in that instinctive, sudden way he had that he didn't understand but accepted as part of him, like his gray eyes or skinny-boy build) her daughter's aloofness, restlessness, raging need for life outside Dearmont. He saw how these things cut against Dome's own nature, made Lauren an enigma to her. Dorrie loved the girl with all her heart, but she wasn't quite the daughter that Dorrie had expected. Or wanted.

  The moment passed.

  That hot, alien feeling left as quickly as it had come.

  Dorrie was still waiting.

  "I'm not taking it personally," he told her. Which was true. Whenever he sensed Lauren's gaze on him, Ramsey did not feel himself an object of hostility but more like some kind of equation she was trying to solve. For that, he co
uld hardly blame her. If Lauren Campbell was an enigma to her sweet, schoolteacher mother, Ramsey Doe was an enigma to himself.

  * * * *

  His upstairs bedroom was small, the angled ceiling making it smaller. But it was his, and the door locked, and that was all that mattered.

  Besides, he didn't have much stuff. Jeans, T-shirts, a battered army jacket hung in the closet. A college-store print of Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? hung on his wall. Secondhand paperbacks filled the bookcase: thrillers and some horror, but he was also reading his way through a list of novels that had been banned or challenged in high schools across the country. The Color Purple. Foxfire. A Clockwork Orange. The Handmaid's Tale.

  Add in his notebooks and journals, and that was it for worldly possessions. A person should travel light, he figured (as if he himself had any other choice). You never knew what you might pick up along the way.

  He walked to the window and lifted the blind.

  They were in the backyard, as they often were, because Dome wouldn't allow smoking in the house (a rule that Lauren often violated late at night, the scent of the smoke seeping into Ramsey's room). They sat on lawn chairs facing the woods, Lauren's injured leg propped in front of her. The air was soft with late June. Paul Andes was leaning over Lauren, whispering in her ear, and she was laughing.

  When school was in session Paul Andes was part of the foyer crowd, so called because they hung out on the benches in the school lobby, beneath the skylights, as if the sunlight itself were officially anointing them. Andes had a reputation among the more marginalized kids as one of the decent ones. Friendly with different cliques, never bullied or taunted anybody.