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  Lauren shifted a bit in the doorway. "You seemed to take offense."

  "I didn't take offense," he said. "I just disagreed with you."

  "You must think I'm a bitch."

  "Lauren."

  "I can be bitchy, sometimes."

  "I don't think you're a bitch. I just think you're unhappy."

  She was silent again, then said, "You sure you're only fifteen?"

  He didn't know what to say to that. He didn't get a chance to say anything. Lauren slipped away, pulling the door behind her. He heard the soft sound of the latch, and then he was alone again, sealed inside the darkness and the quiet.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the dreams.

  * * * *

  Lizardking was as good as his word. Ramsey came home from working a lunch shift at the diner, the smell of the tuna-fish special still in his nostrils. He was kicking his shoes into the hall closet when he noticed the flat brown envelope on the mat below the mail slot. His name and address were scrawled on the front.

  In the high left corner, a second name and address:

  L.K.

  C/o King's Way

  132 Leary St.

  San Francisco, California

  He picked up the package. Usually he took any mail directly to his room, waited until he was behind that closed door: a leftover habit from the boys' home, where privacy was something you fought for and hoarded. But now, standing in the front hall where people could assail him from three different directions, Ramsey ripped open the envelope and tilted the contents into his hand.

  A CD. The cover art was roughly, brutally painted: a desert setting. Black mountains carving out a jagged horizon. A slender woman knelt in the sand, her face turned away from the viewer. Black, ragged wings sprouted from her shoulders. Her body was cut and bleeding, her hands out in front of her. Her fingers were tipped with long silver blades.

  Below the image, a line of type said simply,

  TRANSGRESSIONS.

  He went to his bedroom. He plugged himself into his Discman and curled up on his bed.

  It wasn't music you listened to, exactly. It was music you fell into. It opened itself up, beckoned you to the precipice, and then either you jumped in or the music just reached up and pulled you down; either way, it swallowed you whole. One song bled into the next, into the next, into the next, and the more you listened the more you got the sense that it wasn't just the beats that mattered, it was the spaces in between where something else was happening, some deep primal code tattooing itself into your brain, into your being, some message that, if you listened closely and often enough, you would crack wide open.

  And there would be discovery.

  There would be revelation.

  And then he would suddenly shift out of this kind of thinking and wonder at himself, shake his head—what the hell?—it was just music, after all, just a woman howling Don't take it for granted/We'll eat you like air/It's one thing to want you/Another to care and he felt the rhythms driving down through his body, feet twitching, shoulders jerking, and it was like warm golden air moving through him. He was feeling that happy. It was that kind of bliss.

  At some point he must have dozed off without realizing it, because he was in the middle of a wasteland. No signs of life at all, just the sweep of beige-orange sand enclosed by jagged rock.

  "Are you ready?" a woman asked from behind him.

  He turned, and there she was: the hitchhiker, the girl from the CD cover. Her hair was white-blonde, sticking up around her head in windblown tufts. Hip bones jutted above her low-slung jeans. You wanted to hold and protect her; only, Ramsey thought, she might shatter in your arms, cut you up with her broken pieces.

  Ramsey said, "Who are you?"

  She didn't seem to be looking at him but through him. It was as if he weren't talking to a real person but some kind of random impersonal holograph, projected into his mind. "Come to the desert," she said. "I have something to show you."

  "Who are you?"

  He didn't expect her to answer. But suddenly her eyes shifted, and she seemed to look directly at him. As he opened his mouth to ask another question, she faded.

  "Don't go," he said, and woke up with a keen sense of loss.

  Subject: eternal gratitude

  LK,

  Wow. It's like the movie of my life just found the perfect soundtrack. Thanks.

  Nemesis.

  Subject: re: eternal gratitude Nemesis—

  You really mean that you should come down this way. Prove your devotion. © Word's out that Trans is cooking up something BIG and once-in-a-lifetime special, out in the Mojave, and I'm putting together a group of people gonna go out and take part in it. You're totally welcome to join us. King's Way, San Francisco. Go there. Ask for me. Someone will give you directions.

  LK

  P.S. Did you dream about her?

  He had Friday off. Abe got his driver's license, which they celebrated by driving out of town and spending the day at the skate park. Ramsey came home flushed, exhilarated, blowing hair from his eyes.

  When he stepped inside the house, it felt empty and silent. He remembered: Dorrie and John had gone to a wedding in Ithaca, would not be back until the next morning.

  The door to the den was partly open.

  Lauren was on the couch, her good leg pulled up against her chest, TV light flickering across the high rounded lines of her profile.

  On the screen, a young ballet dancer performed alone in a studio. She was very thin, long-legged, dressed in a white nightgown with her hair loose to her waist. She held a candle out in front of her, like a gothic heroine moving through a haunted house.

  It was Lauren as she'd been as a dancer, before the knee injury.

  When the dance ended, Lauren pointed the remote like a gun at the screen and rewound the tape. She played it again. He watched along with her, secretly. His gaze kept shifting from the Lauren on the TV screen to the Lauren on the couch. The dancing girl seemed so ethereal; it was hard to believe she could emerge from the dance and turn into someone real. She seemed… doomed was the word that came to mind, but he shook it away. He turned his attention to the Lauren in the room with him, sharing this near-darkness: the suntanned healthy girl with a sensuality the dancer on the television was too stripped down to possess.

  When she finally glanced over at him, the light streaked off her tears.

  "Hey," he said.

  "I'm not crying." She was wiping at her eyes. "I will not fucking cry."

  "Hey," he said again. He sat on the couch beside her and patted her back. She turned to him and put her head on his shoulder. And suddenly the gesture seemed easy and natural: he put his arms around her, and held her.

  Too soon, she pulled away and stood up and left the room. His body still savored the feel and scent, the imprint of her. He needed distraction. He'd go online, maybe, or go finish his Robert Cormier novel—

  She reappeared in the doorway, a glass in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other. "This one's mine," she said, lifting the bottle. "Aimee's sister got it for me. You want some?"

  "No. Take it easy, okay?"

  She grinned at him, limping into the room. She had traded in her crutches for a cane, and could go short distances without it. "Worried I'll end up in AA?"

  He shrugged. "You know what they say…"

  "Huh. What do they say?"

  "It's one thing to drink with others. It's another thing to drink alone."

  "I'm not drinking alone. I'm drinking with you." She poured some scotch into the glass and sipped. She looked at him and cleared her throat and started to say something, then paused, then cleared her throat again. "I don't want you to go," she said.

  Ramsey absorbed her expression, her words, for a full moment and then laughed. "I'm not going anywhere. I have no plans."

  "Munroe said…"

  "Munroe said what?"

  She looked down at her glass. "Forget it."

  "Lauren—"

  "Forget it."
/>   Aimee's words suddenly coursed through him: He would tell me how I'd die. And when I'd die. Looking at Lauren now, for a moment, half a moment, he thought he saw death in her eyes.

  No way, he thought, and felt a stab of panic in his gut. No.

  The night deepened outside the windows. Lauren talked about the first time her aunt took her to a ballet, when she was five years old. She talked about how much she missed her dance life, her life in New York. She talked about how difficult she found it to make friends.

  "But you're beautiful," Ramsey blurted.

  She laughed at him. "So?"

  She talked, and he listened; she talked as if she hadn't had the chance to say any of this to anybody, not even Aimee; and he hung on every word. He began to realize that she was fascinated by his fascination with her.

  Finally she said, "Enough. Enough. Now you talk."

  Ramsey grinned. "Me?"

  "Share something," she said. "I've, like, spilled my guts. Now it's your turn."

  "I'm not a big talker."

  "I noticed."

  "In fact, I'm a pretty quiet guy."

  "You don't have anything to say?"

  "Guess not."

  "Liar."

  "There is something…" But it seemed so daring, so exposing. He had never shown those pictures to anybody. And yet, he wanted to share something of his life, himself, the way he really was; and he knew if he tried to use words he would only fuck it up. "Upstairs," he mumbled. "In my room."

  At once he wished he'd kept quiet. But Lauren was grinning, pushing to her feet. "Show me. Lead the way."

  * * * *

  He had never shown these drawings to anyone except Dr. Ryan, who had counseled Ramsey for four years, right up until his heart attack in a Tex-Mex restaurant five blocks from his office. Ramsey had felt that death like a knife slipping into him. He wasn't sure why he'd held on to these drawings (Ryan had kept some of the others, and Ramsey had no idea what had happened to them), why they had traveled with him through the years, the ever-shifting living situations.

  So how to begin to explain them to Lauren?

  He couldn't think of anything to say that didn't sound hopelessly lame. He handed her the sheaf of papers and let her sift through them in silence.

  "So you made these?" Lauren said finally. "When you were a real little kid?"

  "The shrink wanted me to. He was looking for clues, you know, to piece me together."

  "So who is she?" Lauren said. "Someone you used to know? It is the same woman, right?"

  "The shrink thought so."

  "Your mother?"

  "No." For all that he couldn't remember about himself, Ramsey was sure of that. The blue-eyed, black-haired female figure he'd outlined and colored in so many times—crayons gripped between his clumsy little-kid fingers—was not his mother.

  "So why draw her over and over?" Lauren leafed through the drawings again. "In this one," she said, "she's some kind of a—what's that word—"

  "Falconer. Something I learned about at school."

  In the picture, the woman stood flatly, without depth or dimension, and held out her right arm. A chain looped her wrist and traveled up into the sky, tethering the stick-thin ankle of a large white bird. The bird's wings were straining for flight, its eyes like dark lonely wounds.

  Lauren said, "And you have no idea who she is."

  "No. But the bird is me." Ramsey touched the white wing. "The bird is somehow supposed to be me. I know that."

  Lauren gave a low whistle. "Pretty heavy."

  Ramsey said nothing.

  "So you think, whoever she is, she played a key role in whatever happened to you, your family?"

  "I don't know." Frustration in his voice, but it was thin and worn after years of not knowing. He could be looking at an entire lifetime of not knowing. Ramsey knew he had to come to terms with that, or go crazy.

  He remembered what Munroe had said:

  Your father shot your mother, and then you, and then himself—

  Your body tells the story. Bodies often do.

  There was an odd little birthmark in the center of his chest, about the size a bullet might make. But that was just a birthmark. It wasn't my blood.

  "I don't understand." She put the drawings on his desk. "Why be so secretive about this?"

  "It's just private, Lauren, that's all—"

  "It's you, your past. Nothing to be ashamed of. Or…" She tilted her head as a new thought occurred to her. "Or does the woman in the pictures frighten you?"

  Her brown eyes scanned his face, and Lauren's own face showed a turn of understanding.

  "That's the secret," Lauren said. "She frightens you."

  Held inside the scrutiny of that fine dark gaze, Ramsey didn't say anything. He felt himself cracking open; felt that gaze slipping in, like cool air on sunburn.

  "You're frightened," Lauren said again. And then added, rather wonderingly, "You really are so alone in this world—"

  And with that, she'd gone too far. "Lauren," he said, annoyed, except then—

  Except then she was kissing him.

  He was too stunned to react. She'd taken him by surprise. She'd taken his very breath: her lips soft against his own, her body moving close, her hand coming up to the back of his neck. The warmth of her tongue, at his lips and darting between them. She tasted of scotch. She backed him against the bed until they had no choice but to fall across it, tangled in each other. Lauren laughed. He smiled helplessly back at her. He didn't have the breath to laugh. She lifted herself on her elbows, dipped her head so that her soft thick hair brushed his face. And they were kissing again; such bliss, this kissing; he'd fooled around with girls before, clumsy groping in the back seats of cars, basements, beneath the bleachers, that kind of thing, and all of it so stupid, really, because it didn't compare to this at all, he'd never been kissed like this before, he'd never even known. This was what it meant to want someone. The hunger in his body so streamlined, so focused on her. It couldn't be any other girl. It had to be her.

  And then he felt the descent of another kind of clarity: the hot wave of insight and understanding storming through him. Ah, no, Ramsey thought, as Lauren pushed up his T-shirt and laid a trail of kisses across his chest and belly. No, no. Let me have this. He didn't know whom he was addressing—not addressing, but begging—perhaps just his own sense of decency. Or something else. Something that lived deep inside him, that whispered against his bones.

  She was tugging at his belt buckle.

  "Lauren," he said.

  She grinned, her eyes open and bright. He grasped her wrists in his hands.

  "We shouldn't do this," he said.

  "Ramsey." She blew a strand of hair off her face. "I know what I'm doing—"

  "You're drunk. Your judgment is impaired."

  "Not that impaired," she said evenly.

  Something new came into her eyes. Ramsey recognized it for what it was: a touch of predator. He drew back a little, not from fear but from surprise.

  "You lied to me," she said suddenly, savagely. "You're not fifteen—"

  "You stopped seeing Paul because you slept with him and regretted it," Ramsey said. "And you didn't want to do it anymore."

  "You're ages and ages older than that—"

  "Because you can't go back to just holding hands with him, can you?"

  Her lip trembled for a moment—half a moment—before she pulled away from him.

  "So is that it?" she said. "You don't want to skip the holding hands part?"

  "That's not—"

  "You're right. What the hell was I thinking. Christ, you're a kid." Lauren said the word with disdain, although she herself was only one year older. She balanced on her good leg, looked around for her cane. "I'm a frigging child molester."

  "Lauren—"

  "Someone should lock me up."

  "I don't want you to regret me," Ramsey said, but her only response was her body retreating. And then a slammed door.

  Chapter Fourteen
/>
  They landed somewhere in the mountains.

  A pale-haired man in a uniform boarded the plane. He and Kai exchanged a few words of Spanish. The man glanced at both passports so briefly that Jess had to wonder why they'd even bothered to bring them. The man nodded at them both, then stepped down from the plane. Jess glanced out the window and saw him striding towards the small white terminal at the edge of the airfield.

  She felt hands at her shoulders. Kai was draping the wool blanket around her. "You'll want this. It's cold outside."

  "So what nationality is your passport?"

  "Which one?" His eyes gleamed with what might have been humor. "I have ten."

  The car climbed higher into the mountains, narrow road shearing off into rock-tumbled gorges. Silence ran vast and deep. This was a land, she thought, that belonged only to itself.

  They turned into a narrow road that cut into the mountainside. And then, perched high on a ridge, the chateau came into view: a rambling building of dark stone, a pitched and shingled roof.

  Jess said quietly, "What is this place?"

  "A prison," Kai said.

  The Cherokee traveled up the driveway, loose stones crunching under the wheels. The driver said nothing to either of them as first Kai and then Jess got out of the car, doors slamming.

  Jess stood there, numbed, watching the Cherokee fade down the road. Last chance, she couldn't help thinking. Except her last chance had come and gone while she was back in New York, and perhaps before then. I need to know, Kai had told her, as if the choice were hers to make. Something huge and dark was closing over her, and one person's will seemed a small thing in comparison. It was like standing on the beach with your arms spread, trying to hold back a tidal wave.

  Hang on, she told herself. Watch and listen and stay low, until you start to figure things out. And then go from there.

  A woman was waiting for them.

  She was standing on the porch: a tall, statuesque figure with thick red hair that fell almost to her knees. She wore jeans and a fur jacket and held herself so still she seemed to seal off the space around her, untouchable as a princess in a glass coffin.