The ghost nodded sadly. No smile, but a new light gleamed in his eyes. “That's the good news. Bad news is, I hung myself, and I'm dead.”
“You've done penance already. Move on, Greg.”
“I gotta tell you—there's a kind of bubble around this house you're in. Making it hard to get through. It's kinda like you're in another world completely, Bleak. Somebody's hemming you in.”
Bleak had sensed energy fields shifting around him—but the Hidden had its tides, its currents, its sea changes. He'd thought it was something like that. “Must be Shoella. Her summoning.”
Greg tried to rub his eyes—then realized he couldn't feel it. “Feel myself less and less...So my kids will get the word, right?”
“They will.”
“Then I'm going...and I ain't comin' back. But, Bleak, be really fucking careful. I saw something that don't have any kinda real shape, around here, watching you. It's changing its shape all the time. And it's angry at you...and...” Greg was starting to recede, back into the wall—into the psychic distance. Getting smaller, rippling. “I saw it in the Hidden—that there's something close to you that wants to trap you...and something else that hates you and they're not far away.... I'd stay and help but I've been getting confused and...” Smaller, smaller. Like a housefly. Hard to hear the fading voice as Greg went on, voice phasing in and out of audibility. “It wants to make you some kinda slave...and... you won't be you anymore...that's the feeling I get...thanks for all...your...”
Gone.
“Gabriel?” Shoella calling, from down the hall.
Greg's warning ringing in his mind, Bleak got up and went to find her. Her bedroom door was open. Candlelight wavered the room's shadows. There was a smell of incense—roses and some unknown musk. He stepped through the doorway and saw Shoella kneeling, facing the door. She was completely nude, yellow candlelight highlighting her dark skin. She was kneeling on an animal skin— a cougar pelt, its outer edges sewn with black feathers.
Bleak had never seen her naked before—had never seen the tattoos on her breasts, dark blue ink designs, like barbed wire, spiraling toward the nipples.
Candle glow replicated in her eyes as she gazed up at him. “Sit with me,” she said.
He had thought they were going to talk about Scribbler's divinations. The scrivening in red ink. But she had some other agenda. He could feel it in the room.
Yorena was there too; the big birdlike familiar was perched on a world globe set up in a far corner. Eyes glittering as she watched him.
Bleak couldn't see much else in the room, outside the circle of candlelight. Just the outlines of masks on the wall; the old, mahogany-framed bed.
Shoella held a carved wooden goblet up to him. It brimmed with a dark liquid. “Honor me by drinking.”
“What is it?” he asked, coming closer, taking the goblet. “Honor me by drinking,” she repeated.
The moment seemed steeped in ritual; she was an ally. He rarely needed ritual magic. But she used it, and he could not disrespect it. So Gabriel Bleak drank.
At first he tasted only sweet red wine, and, he thought, salt. But that might be a little blood, making the salty taste, mixed in the wine. Then something else, something bitter. Very bitter.
He stopped drinking, but it was too late—he felt, almost immediately, that he was slipping into an altered state. Had she introduced a loa into the drink? Some entity infused in the liquid?
But as he squatted by the candle, handing her back the wooden goblet—from which she drank, in turn—he decided that it was something else. It was a druggy feeling.
The walls of the room fell away. There was just the candlelight, seeming to replicate itself into a continuum of candle flames, each flame infinitely repeated within the next, each encompassing the others.
Shoella reached behind her and touched a switch. Music came on, drums and Jamaican voices in words he couldn't quite make out. But he could see the notes, a blood-red and sulfur-yellow stars, dancing in the air as they were sung. And then she was standing beside him, taking his hands, drawing him to his feet, and peeling the clothes from him.
She was so slender, so long and willowy and burnished and warm, her body elongated like a modern sculpture.
She drew him by the hand toward the bed. As they lay down, he thought,
This is some form of enchantment.
But he was a man, caught up in the feeling of her skin against his, their sweat running together in the warm room, as she drew him on top of her; the imperative rising at his groin. He seemed to hear Jim Morrison singing about his mojo rising; Morrison in the darkness, nodding at him, then melting into the cloud that was Bleak's feeling, every sensation pillowy soft except the hard part that she drew into herself, a deep piercing between her legs, as she drew his tongue into her mouth, as she entwined him with her long arms and legs, murmuring incantations in his ear in a language...
A language he didn't quite recognize.
And the thought came to him that if he ever wanted to be a Great Magus, he was not going to achieve it this way, by allowing himself to be drugged and bedded, without it being his True Will.
But right now, he decided, coupling with Shoella
was
his True Will. He melted against her; he shattered himself against her, and the wave rose up again, and he was once more crashing against her...in a midnight sea.
***
GABRIEL BLEAK WOKE TO see silvery light coming through the slit in the curtain over the bedroom window.
Must be dawn.
A powerful restlessness surged up in him. He considered taking Shoella again—she lay beside him, arms and legs splayed. She was deeply asleep, but he knew she would not deny him.
Instead he sat up, swiveled to sit on the edge of the bed, his brain percussing in his skull with the motion. The sensations of his limbs, his bare feet on the floor, seemed to whip around, as if trying to escape, before suddenly snapping back where they should be in his body, with an audible click.
“What was
in
that shit,” he muttered, standing to walk wobblingly out the bedroom door, barefoot and naked down the hall to the kitchen. He was terribly thirsty, badly needing a long drink of water. The kitchen was brighter, the light hurting his eyes. He found a glass, turned the spigot at the sink— nothing came out. “Shoella!” he called hoarsely. “Something wrong with your water.”
Then he became aware of a shushing sound; a gurgling, splashing. Water. But the sound was coming from outside.
He went to the open back door, and looked. And saw that Shoella's backyard was gone. In fact... The whole neighborhood was gone.
In its place was a tropical forest: a verdant hillside, columned by kapok trees and kauri and cathedral fig, canopied by foliage but flecked brightly with bird-of-paradise flowers and flowered lianas and purple orchids and shafts of golden sunlight. Just forty paces outside the back door a small, silver-white waterfall tumbled in slow motion, falling twenty-five feet into a dark green pool. Parrots, bright red and dark green, fluttered in the ancient, gnarled trees.
A rustling to his left. He looked and saw a small deerlike animal—nothing native to North America—with tiny, fuzzy antlers, long ears, exquisite little hooves. It stepped delicately out of the shady underbrush and stopped to look at him with large, brown, mildly curious eyes. It was completely unconcerned. It turned its attention to the little pool under the waterfall, dipped its head to drink.
Okay,
he thought.
I'm still asleep, and dreaming.
But the thirst he felt seemed quite real. Go along with the dream.
Drink from the waterfall. See what happens.
Nakedness couldn't matter here, so Bleak stepped outside the back door and walked along a thin path through knee-high, spearlike grass, his bare feet treading warm red clay. He looked for some remnant of the fences that should be here, the other houses either side of Shoella's. No fence, no houses. No power lines, no people. Nothing but forest.
He came to the waterfall, found himself staring in fascination at its silvery tumbling. He seemed to see each silvery, crystalline drop individually; and at the same time he saw them all at once, in galactic splendor. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.
But something, here, was watching him; something in the trees, the grass, the air itself. Watching.
He looked around—and saw no one. In particular.
Bleak moved closer to the waterfall, stepped out on a warm boulder at the edge of the pool, braced himself with a hand on the mossy hillside, leaned over, plunged his face into the cascade—and drank.
The water sent a stroke of illuminating energy through his body with the first swallow. Straightening up, wiping his mouth, he felt twice the man he'd been a moment before. “Not such a bad dream,” he said.
“It's no dream,” Shoella said, walking up behind him. “This is real. It is a world outside of time,
cher
darlin'.”
“Is it? You know, I don't think we're in Hoboken anymore,” Bleak said, looking around at the place's tropical growth, its verdant beauty.
“No,” Shoella said, laughing. “This is not Hoboken.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The next morning. In Facility 23.
Loraine was propped up on her bunk in the small, windowless, dorm-style room, a cup of coffee on the night table beside her, poring over what she'd written in a notebook the night before.
She'd slept in her clothes. An overwhelming feeling of vulnerability had made her unwilling to undress. Maybe because of Forsythe—or Sean.
And maybe she shouldn't have written out Scribbler's message. Suppose Helman or Forsythe got hold of it? She didn't want them to know about Scribbler, nor get any help from his divination.
But Loraine felt it was important to transcribe the message so she could think about it, try to interpret it. Work out what the words meant for her and Bleak—and for the United States. She could destroy the pages before anyone else saw them. She would wet them, shred them in her fingers, flush them down the toilet.
She had written out most of what Scribbler had channeled—the parts scribbled in red ink. Her photographic memory had served her well, she decided. It seemed right. Her eyes kept returning to one line in particular.
Loraine is beyond the doorway for Gabriel, arms an entrance, Loraine and Gabriel like puzzle pieces made to fit.
Like puzzle pieces made to fit. Soul mates? Two souls created at the same moment, symmetrical to one another, complementary opposites destined to search for one another—and eventually unite. It would explain the strong emotions that came over her when she was around Bleak.
The thought made her heart pound.
Gabriel Bleak.
She shook her head, amused at herself.
But if it was true—it was appalling.
Everything's been decided for me.
And if he was in fact her soul mate, now that she knew it, how could she ever have a relationship with any man besides Bleak? She would always know that the “someone else” was not her “intended,” in the truest sense. She might be destined to be alone because there was every chance Scribbler's “puzzle pieces made to fit” would not be fitted.
Now that she knew what CCA was planning, she couldn't work with them—not really. She could only stall them and wait her chance to get away. And that meant she should stay away from Gabriel Bleak—for his sake. If she got together with him, she was playing CCA's game. Besides, the idea of someone like her, hooking up with...someone like Bleak. A ShadowComm. A man from the supernatural underground...Absurd. Almost like a CIA agent falling for Che Guevara.
When Forsythe debriefed her about the “abduction” by Gabriel Bleak, she'd told him Bleak and the woman Shoella would consider brokering a deal between CCA and ShadowComm, allowing the
Shadow Community to remain free. She had skirted talking about Scribbler and given as little information on Shoella as possible. But she didn't think Forsythe was going to leave it that way. She looked at the notebook, wondering...
...Breslin is afraid of the man within the man who stands on his right, and the crack in the wall lets the Great Wrath through, who darkens like ink in the water those he would conceal, and yet move toward Facility 23 and find the liberating truth on the way to the North...
The man within the man who stands on his right. An image came to her mind, a photo she'd seen in a CCA office: Forsythe with President Breslin, both men smiling for the camera. General Forsythe standing on Breslin's right.
Was Forsythe “the man within the man” Breslin was afraid of? Why “a man within a man”?
... and yet move toward Facility 23...
She had done that—she'd moved right
into
Facility 23.
Was she
supposed
to be here? Could it be that she was
intended
to bring Bleak here—but not for Forsythe's reasons. Not for Helman. Not for Sean.
But for something better—by whatever wanted her and Bleak together.
Gabriel Bleak was resourceful, unpredictable, perhaps more powerful than even he suspected. Bringing him here might be like tossing a wrench into the CCA machine.
But if she was considering that—was it really for strategic reasons? Or did she want to bring Bleak here for herself?
A knock at the door. It was a shave-and-a-haircut knock, without the two bits. She swallowed, but made herself call out calmly, “Who is it?” “Drake Zweig. Got a package for ya.”
Zweig? Ugh. If it had to be someone from her team, she wished it could be Arnie.
Loraine got up, hid the notebook under her mattress, ruefully thinking,
Brilliant job of concealment, Agent Sarikosca.
It occurred to her to wonder, as she went to open the door, if the room was camera-live. Where would the surveillance cam be? The light fixture?
She unlocked the door. Zweig was in the hall, with Loraine's overnight bag in his hands. He looked exactly as she'd last seen him. “Got your clothes here, from your place.”