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  "You, dear boy," Munroe said quietly, "are beyond my capabilities."

  Chapter Twelve

  Awareness came like light filtering down through murky water.

  She thought, A plane?

  I'm on a plane?

  A man's voice said, "You're awake."

  Memory bolted through her. She opened her eyes and sat up, the wool blanket slipping off her legs to the floor.

  She was in some kind of private jet. The couch and seats were done in a deep creamy leather. Kai Youngblood was sitting across from her, holding out a bottle of water. Behind him she saw the closed door to the cockpit. The drone of the engines filled the air.

  When she spoke, her voice didn't sound like her own. It was too hoarse, scraping off the base of her throat. "What is this? Where—"

  Kai's face was smooth and calm, but his eyes were as bleak as a bombed-out building. There was a cloth bandage wrapped around his left hand.

  "I'm taking you abroad," he said. He capped the bottle, placed it by his feet. "To someplace very high and very cold."

  "You're joking."

  "Does it look like I'm joking?"

  Her head filled with white noise, fuzzy static. The only thing she could think of to say was, "I don't have my passport."

  Kai reached into the pocket of his overcoat and produced the slender document. "You do."

  "How… ?"

  He shrugged, looked innocent, sipped water.

  "Is this your jet?"

  "On loan from a friend. As are the pilots."

  Kai's eyes were on her, the color of dark fire. He glanced pointedly at her right wrist.

  She followed his gaze and saw the faint blue line that looped the skin. She flashed back to the youth at the foot of the stairs, the glittering lines that overran his chest and back. She remembered the symbols glimpsed on men and women as she navigated her way through the club.

  Kai murmured, "I apologize for what happened with Salik. He and I have known each other since childhood. There are tensions."

  "Tensions," Jess echoed. "He said you were scum."

  "I am not."

  "That you're weak."

  Kai shrugged.

  "He's insane," Jess said flatly. "I saw it. I felt it. Did he really… Did he kill that woman, or was I just on a bad bad trip?"

  Kai looked away. "Things have changed. I didn't expect that place to be dangerous."

  She was conscious of all the dark empty space rushing past the windows.

  "You…" She could feel the words deflate inside her throat. "So what are you? How old are you?"

  "Seven hundred."

  "Years?"

  "Give or take." He looked at her wearily. "The magic changes you physically. It changes your life span. You yourself will discover this."

  He leaned forward and showed her his hands, palms up. That night in the loft, something about them had struck her as odd, and now she realized precisely what it was. Not just the metallic nails. His palms were smooth, unlined, like blank paper. No heartline, no lifeline. No fortunes there to tell.

  Jess whispered, "So what were you before the magic? Were you just a normal guy?"

  "I am a Sajae," Kai said, accenting the second syllable.

  "And your people—the Sajae—all use magic?"

  "Abilities vary."

  "But you. You're pretty good, right?"

  "I'm a Summoner," he said quietly. "I crossed into deep magic when I was thirty-six."

  "So that means you're powerful?"

  "Used to be." Kai looked at her directly and said, "I have a story to tell. Do you think you are ready to hear it?"

  She said, "I don't know."

  The sound of the engines roared in her ears.

  She said, "Try me."

  "Some of my people believe that we are direct descendents of the Watchers, those angels who came down to mate with human women."

  Jess gulped again at her water. "Angels," she said, and couldn't stop some nervous laughter.

  He brushed his knuckles against his mouth. "Those women gave birth to a race of giants. I don't know if you ever heard this story—"

  "The giants ate everything: the animals, their parents, each other. I thought it was just a—"

  "A myth. A story. It might well be, Jess, but it might be seeded in some truth, however distorted. Most of these children—these giants—were destroyed in a great flood. The survivors scattered throughout the world and continued to mate with humans. A segment of that group became isolated high in the mountains and slowly evolved into us." Kai spread his hands a little. "So we were a people of great wisdom and power… and appetite, and lust. There is a dark side to our nature that must be controlled. And we controlled it for a very long time.

  "We were nomads. Our name—Sajae—translates roughly as 'wandering ones.' We mingled freely and openly with the world. We—or at least, the majority of us—promoted peace, knowledge, and healing. It was a good time for us. When we were at our finest, our highest.

  "At least, that's how the stories go.

  "After Rome fell—although it didn't really fall, it was a much more complicated process than that—the Sajae went deep into the desert and created our own city. The Labyrinth. There was little plan to it, little order. It had its own magic. It grew as it would, and we grew along with it. And it's not in our nature to be very…" Kai thought a moment. "It's not our nature to be very ordered. The scientific method was very much a human invention, something your kind taught us, to the extent that we can truly engage with it. But the Labyrinth—our little kingdom—was…" A look of longing passed across Kai's features.

  "But it was the great mistake," he said. "The Sajae became rooted, no longer nomadic, no longer centered on anyone or anything except ourselves. The old values—of teaching, healing, learning—fell away. Our darker appetites began to assert themselves. And those who were powerful began to separate themselves from those who were not.

  "And through the generations, the magic changed as well. It became more and more a commodity, a marker of power and status. No longer taught freely, no longer shared without price. The ruling bloodlines had established themselves.

  "The Labyrinth was founded on magic. But as magic became more and more confined to a power-elite, people were forced to live much differently from before. Manual labor became necessary.

  "And that brought in the slave trade.

  "There was one slave," Kai said. "One young bond-girl. She was sold into the city by one of the barbarian tribes. No one guessed she was as tremendously gifted as she was. And somehow she learned magic. Somehow she entered into a Pact with six other Summoners who opened up one of the oldest, highest, and most forbidden forms of magic. They summoned demons. They took—they took the demons inside them, and became—"

  "Possessed," Jess said.

  He smiled a little. "You're thinking of that movie. The Exorcist."

  "My frame of reference is pretty damn limited."

  "I've seen that movie many times." Kai smiled wanly and shook his head. "It wasn't like that," he said. "Bakal Ashika and her followers were very willing. And they were transformed. And the things they could do. They could rain blood. Open up the earth. Spread disease. Spread illusion, delusion, insanity—

  "They destroyed the old city, the Labyrinth. They turned it to sand. Many of us escaped into the outside world—into Europe and Asia—and they followed.

  "They hunted us down.

  "They slaughtered much of the world, as well. Just for fun, I suppose, although Ashika's vision of what she wanted—of what was possible—was changing. Or maybe she had always been… so ambitious.

  "We fought those demons for almost one hundred years. We were forced to use magic that we had never—never known. We could not kill them," Kai said, "so we banished them to seven prisons, in seven different points around the globe. And we have been guarding them there all this time."

  Jess was shaking her head. "What you're saying—"

  Kai lifted his eyebrows.
>
  "—There would have been evidence of this. Demons and Summoners stalking each other in the Middle Ages—I mean, no offense, but someone would have noticed. At the very least, history would have recorded some kind of massive death toll—"

  The realization struck her, then, and she felt a dark space open up inside her.

  "A massive death toll in the mid-thirteen hundreds," Kai agreed. He looked at her steadily. "The equivalent of a nuclear bomb. A strike so massive it took centuries for the human population to replenish itself."

  "I can't—" Jess pressed her hands to her temples, rocked forward in her seat. "You're talking about the plague."

  "Yes."

  She looked up at him. "The goddamn bubonic—"

  "Yes. The Black Death. It was one of the weapons they used." Kai paused to sip some water. Then: "It was a spellcasting. A very powerful one."

  "But—"

  "What is history, Jess, but memory? What we remember, how we remember it. What we write down. Seven hundred years ago, my colleagues and I were still strong in our power—"

  She sensed a skip of the narrative needle: one moment Kai's people were exiled, hunted down like deer; the next they were powerful enough to rewrite history. There's something he's not telling me, she thought. Hell, there must be all sorts of things he's not—

  "We were strong enough to play with human memory," Kai continued, and she refocused her attention on him. "With collective human memory."

  "So you cast a spell," Jess said. "You cast a massive amnesia spell over the whole world—"

  "Easier than you might think. At least back then."

  "—And so people just pieced that part of history together, from rats and fleas and all those corpses?"

  "We traveled. We talked to people, we planted suggestions. For a long time it was also our mission to find and destroy certain documents. Keep in mind the true plague was a cyclical disease that occurred every now and again. So we disguised our war as one of those outbreaks and concealed it among the periodic real ones." He paused, then added, "But then the Western nature worked to our advantage. Welcome to the age of rational thought, the great enlightenment. Journal entries, stories, paintings, anything that depicted Sajae or the demon battles or the things that truly happened—were soon regarded as nothing more than lunacy. Art. The whims of a more primitive age."

  Jess realized she hadn't stopped shaking her head.

  "Jessamy," Kai said, and there was something new in his voice. "Bakal Ashika has escaped. She's in the world again. After centuries of imprisonment she will be weakened and disoriented, but if she regains her former strength and finds and releases her disciples—"

  "The world burns," Jess murmured.

  "This realm will become one of the hell-realms," Kai said, "and she and her consorts will rule."

  She was silent. She was aware of herself in the plane: the earth cut out from under her, the air too thin to breathe, as time rearranged itself between departure and destination.

  "I don't want to believe you," Jess said. "I'd rather we were both crazy."

  "You know that's not the case."

  "I do?"

  "The knowledge is inside you," Kai said. "It's in your veins. It shapes your art."

  "My art," Jess said. "You mean the boy."

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  "Where does he fit into this? And me. God, why me?"

  She heard a change in the pitch of the engines. Kai glanced out the window, said mildly, "We're beginning our descent."

  "So where the hell are we going!"

  "I'm going to introduce you to someone. A demon."

  He was looking at her with an odd, enigmatic smile.

  She gave a short, sharp laugh. She said, "No way on earth you're serious."

  "His name is Del," Kai said. "You might like him."

  Chapter Thirteen

  To: Nemesis

  From: Lizardking

  Subject: present for you

  NEM.

  What up. The voice is named Asha. She came out of nowhere. The dude behind Trans is Lucas Maddox. They made a CD you can't download all of it. But give me your snail mail and I'll send you a present. 'Cause I'm that kind of guy.

  Lizzie

  Not even the Internet could yield much information about the band. They had come out of LA less than a year before. Ramsey found Internet listings of gigs they'd done at Sunset clubs, a scattering of mentions in obscure e-zines. A search engine led Ramsey to the website of a Los Angeles writer who called himself the Poet:

  * * * *

  … Humid strung-out Friday night. I go to the Strip. Sidewalk rolling with the hipsters and wannabes, guitar kids, girls in little tops and tight jeans with flesh squeezing out above the waistbands, girls with long streaked hair and heavy eyeshadow. Cars cruising past, tops down, blaring rap music, blaring hip-hop, blaring classic rock. Clubs and restaurants a glittering, ramshackle line set against the shadowed hills, where multimillion-dollar houses nestle in folds and crevices.

  I see a crowd gathered outside this club called Snakecharmer, never been there before, bored dude in black T-shirt sitting on a stool by the door. Barely flicking glances at the IDs flashed before him. I pause outside the rope, call out, "Who's playing?"

  He doesn't even look up. "Trans."

  Never heard of them. But there's a vibe, a snapping restlessness, to this loose line of people and so I figure what the hell.

  And then inside, a dark hot small space packed with people. Fight my way to the bar for a beer, fight my way back to a table. The band comes on. Two guitars, drums, keyboard, vocalist.

  And they play.

  How can I describe this? The singer. Oh God, the singer. A raw ripping wail of a voice. Voice that's been to hell and back, seen everything in between. Small skinny girl getting bigger with every beat, veering wildly between broken tortured tenor and sweet cajoling croon, she bends as if injured, letting the words out, getting the songs out, as if the act demands nothing less than every atom of energy she has in that small formidable surprising body.

  And then it's over, they pack up and they're gone, not even acknowledging this audience still hungry, desperate for another feeding. I track down the club manager, ask them, Who are they? He says it's Lucas Maddox's new band. He can't tell me much. They come, set up themselves, don't really speak to anybody, blow through this amazing set, and then they're gone (although sometimes the singer—Asha—deigns to mingle with the commoners outside). They've been gigging pretty regularly at Snakecharmer, other places. Some major-label dude was in last week asking questions about them, but Maddox shut him down real quick. He won't go that route again.

  * * * *

  That night Ramsey had his old dream of the highway. It was cold and dark. Feral dogs rushed from the woods and barked at him (but they wouldn't come too close, kept a respectful distance) and a moon the color of blood burned through the sky. His wrists were clamped and weighted with shackles, and his back was burning with pain.

  But this time he wasn't alone.

  He turned, and although he saw no one he could sense a presence, her presence, like the feel of mist on skin.

  Let me help you, she said, and her voice was unmistakeable, honey mixed with broken glass, let me free you of these.

  There was a click. He glanced down at his wrists, saw the shackles unlock, fall away. They clattered to the pavement.

  A dog howled at him from the edge of the wood.

  All I ask, the voice whispered.

  Rain fell, darkening the pavement, slipping down his face.

  All I ask

  But the dream, the highway, ended there.

  * * * *

  Lauren wasn't seeing Paul anymore. She refused to answer the phone when his number flashed across the caller ID screen. "Well, Paul," Ramsey overheard her mother say awkwardly, "I guess maybe you two should take a break."

  He could only imagine Paul's response.

  Wednesday evening he knocked on Lauren's door. She called out a hal
fhearted "Yeah," and he opened the door partway. She had cleaned and organized her room, which surprised him. The vanilla fragrance was gone. Now the air was scented with lavender.

  " 'Law And Order' just started," he said. "Want to watch?"

  "It's a rerun of a rerun."

  "Okay," he said, but as he was about to withdraw he heard himself say, "Was it something Munroe said?"

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  "Why you suddenly broke up with Paul," Ramsey said.

  "We weren't going out. We weren't boyfriend and girlfriend. So it's not like I broke up with him."

  "Okay. Whatever."

  She had refused to talk about their experience with the odd little psychic in the farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Afterwards, they drove home in silence. Ramsey was wrung out with exhaustion, as if he'd run a marathon; he could tell from the girls' expressions that they felt equally drained. Lauren broke the quiet only once to mutter, "That was… that was insane."

  Now, she only said, "That guy… Munroe… had nothing to do with it."

  "Okay."

  "Absolutely nothing. Munroe is whacked. And so is his brother. Didn't you think so?"

  "No," Ramsey said, then closed her door and went into his own room.

  * * * *

  She appeared in his doorway a little later. "Ramsey," she whispered, and he shifted beneath the thin cotton sheet that was all you needed on a night as humid as this. He opened his eyes, squinted against the flood of light from the hallway.

  "Ramsey," she said again.

  "Yeah?" Other images of Lauren, dream-images whispering words the real Lauren would never say (not to him), pressed against the edges of his mind; he felt his body grow hot. He forced those images away. Foster sister. Parents down the hall.

  Besides, it's not like Lauren would even—

  And yet, as she fell back against the doorframe, hair falling forward to veil her cheek like a forties-style movie star, he could have sworn she was posing.

  "I just wanted to say," she said. She cleared her throat. "I mean, what I said about him. Being insane. Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

  Ramsey had to focus a moment to understand the reference.