by Mark Teppo
Along with his car keys and wallet, Nicols' cell phone had been carelessly thrown on the central island. As I was slathering cream cheese on a toasted bagel, the phone started vibrating and glowing.
I checked the readout. Local number, but no Caller ID information. Which meant, among other things, that Nicols didn't have the number in his phone's address book. I watched it wiggle and glow, quivering on the counter like a pinned lightning bug, and eventually, it stopped. As I finished covering the other half of the bagel, the phone buzzed one last time-a petulant hum signaling the arrival of voice mail.
"Who was it?" Nicols asked. He was standing in the doorway to the hall, wearing an FBI t-shirt and a worn pair of dark jeans. He had wandered toward the kitchen with a stealth belied by his size, though the Chorus had felt his approach and had given me advance warning of his arrival.
"Didn't say." I nodded toward the phone. "Left a message though."
He picked up the phone and navigated through the menus to the call log. "SPD," he said as he pressed a button to retrieve his voice mail.
He eyed the shirt I was wearing. A large bruise stained his forehead purple and black like he had been smacked with an eggplant. The circles under his eyes were worse than mine, smudges like thick ash. "My wife-Sarah-liked that color." His eyelids fluttered, a visual tic betraying his effort to bury a memory that was trying to surface. "Thought it looked good on me."
The phone offered him a verbal menu of options and he punched a series of buttons on his phone. More firmly than I thought necessary. I busied myself with finding cups for the freshly brewed coffee.
"Three messages," he said. "Any guesses as to who they're from?"
"Pender."
He nodded, a distracted look on his face as he listened to the first message. I sighed. Pender: Lieutenant in the Metropolitan Division, a Traveler among Watchers. Both of which translated to "pain in the ass." I poured coffee for both of us, and meted out the bagel halves onto two plates. Nicols nodded absently as I slipped a plate and cup onto the counter near his hand.
"First call was a reminder that I was on administrative leave, and that I shouldn't be engaging in any activity that might be construed as official SPD business." He pushed a button to delete the message. "Five hours ago." He listened to the tiny voice captured in his voice mail. "Second one," he said, holding the phone away from his ear. "Not as genial. Sounds a bit pissed, actually."
He deleted the second message, shaking his head. "That one came in, oh, about the time I was pissing myself and trying to break my neck by running across a dark field in the middle of nowhere." He listened to the final message. "Now, he's definitely wound up."
"Any specifics?"
"He's had a call from the Kitsap County Sheriff's office. They're at the farmhouse along with the Rural Fire Department. They've got a burned body and, well, it sounds like parts of another."
I saw again the soul rising out of the third gunman, the abrupt departure leaving the owner disoriented and confused. I wondered if that was what happened to Summers on the boat. When control was ceded back to him, the flesh refused his Will. Their bodies simply immolated in the aftermath of the possessor's exit. Though in the case of the man in the barn, the exploding ward had done much more than simply burn the meat.
"He say anything else?" I asked.
"Wants to know if I'm with you. Says you are now considered a fugitive."
"And?"
He shrugged and closed his phone. Putting it on the counter, he picked up the bagel. "I'm on administrative leave, remember? Pender can't really say shit about how I spend my free time."
"Doesn't that qualify as aiding and abetting?"
"Aiding and abetting what? I wasn't there, remember?" he said around a mouthful of food. "What am I supposed to do about this magick thing? It's not just about me seeing things that-shit-may or may not be there. Something happened to me at the farmhouse-something was done to me. What do you a call it? An 'incantation'? A 'spell'?"
"It was a fear spell," I said. "Meant to trigger your flight instinct."
"Sure as hell accomplished that. Why didn't you run?"
I smiled at him. "I'm harder to scare."
"Christ." He took a large sip from the coffee mug. "Okay, so it's like my rookie year in college all over again. Everyone's got more experience; they're bigger, faster, stronger. I'm just fresh meat, in on a scholarship and I barely know how to shave. I've got to take these fuckers down when they come at me. Over and over, until they understand that I'm not leaving the field."
Adapt or die. The simple choice all organisms face when evolution sneaks up on them. Adapt along with the world or be discarded. Nicols was starting to figure it out.
He worked through another bite of bagel. "So what value do I have to you? What do you gain by standing around in my kitchen, eating my food?"
"I don't have a car," I pointed out. "And I'm not entirely sure where I am."
"I doubt either issue is really holding you here."
"Well, there is the fact that you came back to the farmhouse, and picked me up before the sheriff's deputies arrived."
"There is that."
"Of course, those gunman probably would have shot you if I hadn't intervened."
He shrugged. "So we're even."
"Okay."
He stared at my face for a long minute, trying to read my expression, trying to ascertain some secrets that would help him gauge his next step. "When's the last ferry?" he asked finally, pointing his cup at the ferry schedule clipped to the refrigerator door.
"Twelve fifty-five," I said.
"The ferry terminal is a five-minute drive," he said. "And we should be earlier than later to be sure that we get on. My goodwill lasts until that ferry hits Seattle. At which point, either you'll have explained to me exactly what I gain by helping you or I'll be turning you over to Pender."
It was simple, really: magick could do many things, but they all took time. Having access to a police officer, and all the databases that came with the badge, made people-hunting much easier. Much quicker.
But it only worked if I had a willing subject. Nicols' price was an explanation. I could afford to give him one. The question raised by his cooperation niggled at me though: What was he getting out of our relationship?
I sprang for hot chocolate at the convenience store on the way to the ferry terminal. We didn't stick around Nicols' empty house to finish our coffee, and the night had gotten cold. I didn't mention to Nicols that the store had been the place where Doug had jumped Gerald Summers. On the ferry, we stayed in the car, drinking our hot chocolate and fogging up the windows with our conversation.
"So Doug knows this woman Kat?" Nicols was trying to make sense of the cursory history lesson I offered, about why I had been charging through the woods and assaulting people on the ferry.
"She performed the ritual with him. You remember that smoke you saw in the center ring? That was a spirit memory of their incantation together. She was both the fulcrum and the wedge that was used to separate Doug's spirit from his meat shell. To make it happen, she had to bring him to a heightened state of awareness, something closer to no-mind where she could get between his gross body and his spirit form."
"No-mind, eh? Some sort of sex ritual?"
I grimaced, and swallowed the sound in my throat. "Yes."
"This the same thing she did to you?"
I hesitated before answering. My head pounded as the memory came on again, as if there was something pushing behind the tattered images. The ritual circle in the woods, the trees with their dark branches and whitened leaves, the other attendants at the ceremony, the light in her eyes and the light shining from holes in my chest as she removed her hand. The sequence was there-like it always was-but something felt off-kilter. Like I was watching a home movie in slow motion, and had finally started to notice the gaps between the frames.
Nicols took my hesitation as disinterest in answering his question. "That's the basis of the bone you've got to
pick with her, isn't it? After ten years, I'm not buying that you're still carrying a torch for this woman. I saw you on the boat, saw how you came after Doug. It's not about being scorned or dumped. It's something deeper."
All the way to my core.
The roots of the Chorus were lost in the dark soil. What gave them sustenance? What fed their need? Was it something other than the soul energy they took?
"Yeah, you don't have to say anything. No one operates in a vacuum, Markham. Especially those who insist that they do. Give me some credit. I've been tracking loners for a long time." His eyes were bright and piercing like a hawk fixed on a lone rabbit out in the middle of a field. He was watching me in his own way, reading me as he read all those who came under his eye as a detective. I had to be careful not to give him reason to pounce on me. I had to be as honest as I could.
Why did that word seem so awkward? I looked at my hands as if there was some answer to be found in the patterns on my knuckles.
"My initiation into the world of magick was much like yours," I said. The words came slowly as if I was telling a story I didn't quite know, as if it were someone else's tale. "Sudden and unexpected. Your example earlier about fresh-faced football players is apropos. You're not equipped to play but you've got no choice. If you were just the rookie-the new guy with a couple of years high school experience-then I was. . the water boy who got drafted into the game because all the other players were injured. I had no clue, and the whole experience probably should have killed me.
"Kat-Katarina Nouranois, her grandfather emigrated from Greece shortly after World War II-Kat was still a neophyte. She had no business attempting the ritual that night. She was overzealous, and things. . got out of control. Before she could effect damage control-if she even knew how-the situation deteriorated, and I was abandoned. I had to figure out how to survive on my own."
He nodded and said nothing, just let the words spill out of me. It's an old saw of his profession: everyone wants to talk; everyone wants to confess their guilty secrets. Self-absolution in a private trinity of sinner, penitent, and priest.
"Every light casts a shadow," I continued. "All routes to enlightenment pass through an inversion of darkness. You have to travel both forward and backward, and some people get lost when they reach that border. They can't let go of their hearts and their minds. They can't destroy their egos. They still have fear. They reach the Abyss, take one look at the Guardian and the path beyond, and they're done. They give up."
"What happened to you?"
"I was left at the edge, completely naked and unprepared. I. . fell, I guess, and someone caught me."
"Who?"
The Chorus hissed, uncoiling in my head. Blackness crawled up my spine, and I shivered involuntarily as the frayed edges of my memories filled in. "I won't say his name."
"Why not?"
"Names are powerful, John Nicols. They make objects real. They give strength to the imaginary."
"So if you say this name, this. . Whatever. . will be real?"
"I've seen far less be summoned and bound by the power of its name. I'm not about to give this being any more reason to find me. Remember what I said to you on the boat? Belief is a very big part of magick, John."
"It sounds like a very big pile of horseshit to me." He waved his hand. "Yeah, okay, I know. It's all a matter of subjectivity and perception. Bla bla bla. Whatever. Okay, so you met some mysterious stranger in the wood. What happened next?"
"Afterward, I wandered for a year, trying to figure out what had happened. I came back to Seattle, intent on finding Kat. But she had vanished; I couldn't find any trace of her. So I went east and tried to-" I swallowed the bile raised by the Chorus. "-educate myself. Survive the best I could."
"It looks like you did pretty well. Must have found the right teachers."
The Chorus flexed in my throat, heat on the back of my tongue. "I have an. . unusual learning style. Very immersive."
He grunted. "I suppose that's to be expected. It's probably not much of a stretch to fit you with an obsessive personality profile."
There was no way he would understand what the Chorus was, and how they came to be in my head. Their knowledge became mine. It wasn't a matter of an obsessive focus at all; it was simply an act of absorption. I hadn't spent the last decade learning how to do magick but rather had spent it becoming magick. Each voice of the Chorus brought with it a wealth of arcane knowledge and occult instruction.
Nothing is ever lost; it is simply transformed.
"Occasionally I would find hints of Katarina. I would be in places where she had been recently, but I never got close enough to find a warm trail."
"So what changed?"
"I met someone who knew her." A random intersection of threads. I shook my head. The funny way the world was woven. "I broker antiquities for a living. It's a means to an end. I get to travel regularly, and I get to poke about in old libraries and the dusty corners of forgotten collections. My clients like to be anonymous. They appreciate someone who understands the nature of the transaction, who will grease the pipe from one end to the other. I have an office in Los Angeles, but I'm never there. An agency answers the phone, and takes care of my correspondence. I spend a lot of my time on the road, making deals and moving pieces.
"Most have esoteric or magickal histories, and some are black market items. Usually the buyer wants the acquisition to remain off the radar. I don't ask about provenance, nor do I care how the artifact comes available. I am an unaffiliated third party who can be trusted to move the object from point A to point B, who will never reveal the identity of the seller to the buyer, and vice versa. I have a reputation for good, clean work. I don't advertise; all my business is through personal references.
"What brought me to Seattle was an Assyrian statue. It used to be in the National Museum in Baghdad. But with the chaos in Iraq during the last decade, a number of pieces have been secretly removed in an effort to preserve them."
He raised his eyebrows, a number of questions half-formed on his lips.
"I'm under no illusions as to what I do, John. I know all the arguments about the preservation of cultural heritages, but do you just let these objects be destroyed because you can't protect them from chaos and barbarianism?"
He nodded curtly. "For the sake of argument, we'll pretend that I agree with you on this point."
"The statue was large enough that it couldn't be quietly smuggled into the US. Rather a certain amount of hands-on attention was necessary to ensure all the hurdles were properly cleared. It came on a boat from India, and there was a week's delay while the paperwork was processed by the Port of Seattle-this is all very standard, you realize-and I had a lot of free time on my hands. The buyer invited me out to his house one night to see his collection. It was almost an accident, really, but during the course of the evening's conversation it came up that we both knew Katarina."
"Really? Small world."
"It isn't, actually."
He gave me a thin smile. "I know. Rarely do people run into each other by accident. There's always something in their histories that brings about these happy collisions. An old detective I knew when I was younger used to say: 'There are no coincidences, only convergences.' " He sighed and looked out the window. "Now that I can see these energy lines, it seems even more true."
I acknowledged his point. "According to my buyer, there was a good chance Kat was still in Seattle. I decided to stick around for a while and see if I could find her."
"And when you find her?" His eyes, watching my expression now.
"I don't know," I said. The Chorus twitched behind my eyes, a motion contrary to the innocence of my statement. They had a plan. They had been waiting a long time to taste her. Take back what was stolen. That was the only way.
Nicols' extrasensory sight may have seen the flicker of light in my eyes. His face was unreadable-a mask of sagging flesh that gave nothing away except a long-suffering weariness with human frailties and self-deceptions. "This
isn't about revenge?"
"Maybe," I admitted. Something moved in my gut like a giant sea creature rising toward the surface of the water. An untoward surge of stomach acid for such a noncommittal word.
Honesty.
"Okay, I appreciate that." He swirled the liquid in his cup and drained the last of the chocolate, his throat working.
My hands knotted themselves in my lap as the Chorus hissed at me. Do you really need his help? Is it worth the complications? His contacts with the police department could help me track Doug. His badge could grant me immediate access to places that I would have to otherwise force with magick and the force of my Will. Speed was an issue. Pender had begun to regret letting me go and, if he caught me a second time, he wouldn't make that same mistake again. I needed a shortcut, and Nicols was the closest thing I had.
No other reason? The Chorus tightened in my throat. I swallowed heavily, feeling their knot.
Nicols' hands moved toward his coat pockets, reaching for a cigarette, and then stopped. Someone walked past the front of our car and glanced at us, their eyes like phantasmal fire through the mottled condensation on the windshield.
The soul is a guttering flame sunk within our shells. Its light permeates the flesh, driving away the shadows that live in the heart, liver, and lungs. As the spirit is nourished by Knowledge and Reason-the reoccurring mythological symbols of enlightenment's sacred mysteries-the spark grows stronger, coughing and sputtering into a real flame.
The passage of Doug through Nicols' body had been like a burst of oxygen to a starved flame. A channel had been opened, and fuel had been given to his spirit. But he hadn't been damaged, not like Kat's hand on me. His initiation could be temporary. The pipe could be closed. He could return to the life of a guttering candle, burning so faintly that the back of his head would be forever in shadows.
He deserved a chance to make his own choice.
