-Algernon Charles Swinburne

The night was incredibly wild.

In poetry, the night was always deathly still, cold and silent, eerie. The animals returned to their burrows to take shelter from what ghosts may walk the traveler's path, and the died down as if to help catch the creeping thief.

But the nights in the valley between and just west of Tata Acasa and Circ Gri were never silent, and never still. Haunting winds blew up around the tall, free-standing stones and whispered over the ground, the spirits' muted chanting. Sweet giggles from the chimes that hung in trees near the hill tops floated down, along with the dry scent of ice.

One robed and hooded figure stood among the stones, his face hidden among the shadows inside his cowl. The wind blew dark and thick, and heavy clouds passed over his head, masking and then revealing the stars. A frail, watery moon hung far away, small and thin like a delicate china plate.

The figure lifted one hand and drew a knife out of the belt at his waist. It had a long, narrow blade that cruved back like an arching dancer and a handle made of dark wood. The silver metal caught in the flashing moonlight a moment as the figure walked in a slow circle, touching each stone doorway and the earth between. He moved quickly and gracefully despite the thick material of the robe, and as he turned to the northern doorway of the circle, his hand motions were not impeeded by the long sleeves.

At each of the eight stone doorways, he stopped and gestured. His hands were slow but sure, and as he worked a particular kind of wind came into the valley. It swirrled in a tight circle around the doorways, protecting them from outside gusts. The figure lifted a bag from the center of the cirlce and drew out a metal disc the size of his hand, with a large moonstone set in the center. At the northern gate, he replaced the onyx disc above the doorway with one from the bag, then continued around the circle.

When all eight discs were in place, he stepped to the metal plate in the center and lifted his head. The hood dropped back to reveal a young man, not older than twenty, with hair like livid mahogany and green eyes that drew the light. His expression was cold as he made a few gestures with his hands and waited. For a long moment nothing happened. He closed his eyes, and a pained expression crossed his face, touching the curl of his lip and the corners of his eyes. Then the clouds above stopped moving. The moon was visible, and as the figure drew his hand in a slow circle, lunar rays reached out and caught the eight moonstones. They reflected into the air, catching each other a foot above the boy's head, and created a perfect etheral prism of floating moonlight.

The figure stood motionless for several minutes, his eyes still closed. When he opened them, the wind began to return in small gusts, and the moonstones gently faded. He made a few quick motions with his hands, then gathered up the onyx discs and put them in his bag. After glancing around, he turned toward the path up to Tata Acasa. His steps were long and slow, plodding through the snow that fell two feet deep around his ankles.

He didn't see the headlights as they rose up over the hill.

He didn't feel the warmth on its way.

Martin O'Bach closed the front door and stood silently in the kitchen for a moment. The house was empty except for a fire burning in the living room, and he stamped his shoes only a moment with no one around to watch him slack off before tossing them into a closet.

In his bedroom off the living room, he slipped out of the thick woolen robe and into a pair of jeans. He put on an old V-neck sweater which was really too thin for the weather and found that he liked the chill on his skin, liked the faint, distracting pain it produced.

From the cabinite beneath the kitchen sink came a bottle of brandy, and he poured a stiff drink into one of the small, silver chalices lined up in the drying rack. He carried the cup into the living room and sat down on the polished wood floor in front of the hearth.

Flames broke apart between the sturdy six-foot logs he had piled there before he left. Sparks jumped up like tiny firework displays, and the smell of cedar dug into Marty's sinuses. He put the chalice on the mantle and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

The other Chimera were away. They'd left on Saturday and wouldn't return until Friday, and Marty had the house to himself. He didn't have to be doing any of this, no one was there to approve of his adherance to tradition.

But he was doing it. Eighteen years of memories flooded back at him as he stared into the flames and listened to the chimes on the front porch. These dark Yule nights, when they would gather together before the fire and in quiet, honest voices, confess their darkest moments from the passing year, then wait for the hope the dawn promised to bring.

There was no one here this time. They'd all gone to Arizona to be with the Tuscon Chimera at Gradina Rosu. Marty's father had been furious when Marty said he didn't want to go, and if his uncle Peter hadn't stepped in, Marty got the feeling he would have ended up saying something he might later regret.

Funny, he never used to get those urges. He never used to assume he even had a "later."

There was no one there to make sure he carried out the ceremony. Just Marty, alone in the living room in the deathly still house with his cup of brandy and his darkest moment.

"My darkest moment this year," he said aloud. The words rang strange and awkward in the empty room.

He didn't bother telling whatever was listening his exact moment. It knew. Everyone who knew Marty knew.

He felt back, let the pain and horror of it wash over him again, felt Shale torn out of him as though with a dull knife. Like a pacemaker exploding. Like that thing that pops out of the guy's chest in "Alien."

The tears came, burning and stinging, and he pressed his eyes closed. Lifting the cup to his lips, he whispered fervently, "Spirits, corners, everybody, listen a minute. I know we haven't been on very good terms these last few months. I know I've bitched at you a lot. I'm not apologizing, because I have had every right to hate you.

"But the truth is that I don't think I can get through this alone any longer. It's not getting easier. I'm hurting my father, and my uncle, and everyone else who's tried to help me this year and gotten shoved away."

The flames lifted as he opened his eyes. "Give me the strength to hold on until it stops hurting," he said. "Give me the faith to believe that there's a meaning to all this."

He tipped the goblet up and let the brandy pour down his throat. It tasted bitter, but he felt the warmth rise in his stomach and nodded to himself. He'd finished the ceremony, the dawn was on its way. He walked to the stereo in the corner and picked up a CD he'd carried in from his bedroom. Setting the thin disc on its spinning wheel, he smiled distantly at the sweetness of being alone with the music.

After pressing PLAY, he lay back on the hard floor and let the heat take him, let the fire and the liquer burn all his pains away.

The prayers in his head had no words, just dull hope. Shale's death had been too unexpected, as her life had been, and the first few days afterward he had been too stunned to react at all. Then it was with careful control, always following the natural progression of the grief cycle, always hoping to appear calm and well-adjusted. He even wrote a piece for Daybreak Monthly, talking about the accident and what it meant.

But how could he be well-adjusted? His soulmate was dead. His life was utterly changed.

It was when he saw the article in print that he started to get angry. Angry at what, he wasn't sure, but the fire was there behind it in no short supply.

What crap, he thought. Shale's dead and I'm supposed to become some kind of blathering poet? Dad thinks I can just pick up the pieces and go to college like I had never been expected to die? Thea wants me to take up Grandma's project? None of it is that simple.

Marty lay still on the floor, letting the drafts brush over him, and the music started. Those fragile violins came out of no where, wrapping together like strands of smoke. Then the cellos, then the horns, so light, so gentle. The melody reached out as if asking permission to speak to him.

The bases came in, the violins reached, they all swam together with the drum's heart beating low and hard, and those terrified violins begging and warning in the same verse. They were swept up in the story, they had tried to send him away but he lay still on the floor and the music glanced sadly back at him, recognizing the inevitable victim he was to become.

Marty was able to stop thinking when Giuseppe Modesti and Richard Tucker began singing. They were old friends, Giuseppe's rich, foreboding voice and Richard's clear nieve one. Horns, the story set in motion. Marty felt himself draw breath with each rising note, exhale at the de cresendos. The stereo was turned up almost to eight, the house was throbbing with sound.

It took him all of act one to realize that someone was beating on the front door.

Cafi Dana was beginning to think she had made a mistake. Not only had the place been impossible to find, but now whoever was inside couldn't hear her knocking over the shockingly loud opera. She'd been kicking the front door for the last twenty minutes, in between outbursts of curses and attempts at wading through the snow to windows.

I shouldn't have come, she thought furiously. This was idiotic.

She'd left behind her apartment, her three parakeets, and a support group looking to her for guidance in order to come here. Supposedly, to write a book while she helped Martin O'Bach get over the death of his soulmate. She was supposed to be an expert in the field, probably because she was the only person in the field and no one else wanted to tackle such a depressing topic.

Lately she'd been having serious questions about her expertise.

The music came to a lull and Cafi jumped at the chance, throwing her entire weight against the door. Oh, the bruises she would have tomorrow.

A symphony began playing and she clenched and unclenched her hands. Fine, she'd go find a hotel and come back tomorrow. Mathias O'Bach could pay for tonight's room, since he hadn't bothered letting her in.

Just as she was turning back toward her car, she heard the door open. Stopping knee-deep in snow, she twisted to look.

A guy her age was standing in the doorway. He wore jeans and a sweater with a deep V-neck that showed a lot of his chest, and she could see him shivering. His hair was light brown, hanging limply to his shoulders, high lighted with gold from a fire in the room nearby. There wasn't much moonlight, but what did find its way between the clouds seemed drawn to his eyes, giving their edges a silver-green glow.

It took a moment for her memory of him from a year ago to fit in with this image. They were strangers, but she had met him before. His hair was longer, his body was thirty-pounds heavier--thank God for that, he'd been absolutely emaciated the last time she saw him--and his expression was...blank. Just as it had been before.

Cafi climbed out of the embankment and back onto the stoop, holding her suitcase at chest level to keep from getting it wet. Marty stepped back and beckoned weakly her inside, a disinterested frown touching the corners of his eyes. Cafi thanked him but couldn't even hear the words she spoke, the music blasting from the next room was so loud.

Marty closed the front door and rehooked various locks. He glanced at her again, at the suitcase in her hand, and then seemed to remember something. He glanced out the window, pressed his lips together, and gestured her toward the living room. Cafi sank down onto the couch just before he vanished up a stair case.

The living room was spacious but cozy. A fire burned in a hearth built for spit-cooking cattle whole, and light glinted off the glassily polished wooden floor. Stained windows let colored moonlight rub its hues along the furniture. Cafi picked up a framed photograph from the corner table, of three or four dozen men arranged in a loose group. She wasn't able to find Marty in it.

The ceiling reached up above a walk-around to the second floor, which Marty tread quickly with a bundle of linens in his hands. Cafi tried to say something but she still couldn't hear a word over the music, and he passed by her with a quick shake of his head. He vanished again into a door to the left of the fire place.

Well, this is strange, Cafi thought. Isn't there anyone else around?

She took off her shoes, which were soaking wet with snow, and set them on a mat beside the front door. The music had eased off when she returned, now the gentle strummings of a harp with an occassional trumpet call.

She wasn't exactly an opera fan, to put it mildly. She'd heard ten minutes of a screaming rendition of Carmen and sworn it off forever. This particular section wasn't so bad, even once the women started in and the harp became mere accompaniment. Cafi felt like she was sitting in a doctor's waiting room, alone and unsure, with this stupid music playing to help her relax.

Marty came back out of the room and picked up her suitcase, motioned toward the door with one hand. He stoped to indicate the bathroom, then led her into a small bedroom. The bed was a double, made from a polished oak frame, and there was a matching desk and dresser set set against the opposite wall. Marty set her suitcase on the bed and glanced around, shrugging. The mattress was freshly made with clean sheets--Cafi could smell them--and a space heater was plugged into the socket.

She gave him a little smile, but as he started back out the door she grabbed his wrist. His skin was hot, she noticed, even though he was still shivering. She thought he might hear it if she spoke now, and knew it would be disrespectful if she broke his silence. His eyes were a green she didn't have words to describe, as light as fog, a veil of sea water over his soul. For a moment she recognized him as the same broken young man she had tried to reach out to a year ago, she saw that pain that was in all of them, so folded and attacked and tucked away that it had grown wrinkled.

Thank you, she mouthed, squeezing his hand. He nodded as he pulled away, his eyes lingering on her. His expression was wary, disturbed, as he stepped back into the living room and pushed the door shut.

Cafi glanced around. It was a nicer room than she had expected, she would have no trouble working here. The hand-made rag rug felt good under her feet and warmth from the fireplace came through the walls.

In the living room, the music died an abrupt death. A moment later a nearby door closed. Hope I didn't ruin his evening, Cafi thought, although she saw by the bedside clock that it was almost two in the morning. Sitting down on the bed, she opened her suitcase.

There was a legal pad on top of her clothes with just a few lines written on it. A few vague ideas for book chapters, things that should be brought up. Cafi picked up the pen attached to the top and uncapped it, thinking suddenly that she wanted to write something. Not just anything--she wanted to illuminate that expression that she'd seen on Marty's face, that broken expression with the pieces missing. She wanted it as the opening for this book, that expression that the reader could go to a mirror and see in his or her own face, so that they would know she understood.

But the words didn't come. Maybe she wasn't ready, or maybe she just wasn't that good a writer. Maybe it had been a long flight and she was tired.

She tossed the pad onto the desk and separated her clothes into a couple of piles, shirts, pants, undergarments and socks. Lifting a bundle of sweaters, she turned the corner around the desk and felt her knees suddenly go weak.

There was a dead mouse on the floor.

Her breath caught in her throat like a sticky rubber ball and she made a wet, choking sound. Tearing her eyes away, she turned.

And there was another one.

She launched herself onto the bed, silent and shaking. She wanted to close her eyes but dear god there could be more. Her stomach tightened painfully, like a washcloth being rung out, and she felt the panic start to rise up in her lungs, the urgent need to scream.

Cafi wasn't a wimp. She wasn't afraid of living mice, of roadkill or the dead deer she'd hit on the highway one night. She'd dragged the thing into the backseat of her car, hadn't she?

But she had a serious dead mouse phobia. It had come from terrifying dreams she'd had when Jeremy died, of dead mice piling up all around her, of opening up her shampoo bottle and finding it crammed with dead mice. Of being raped by a giant man-sized mouse. Absolutely horrifying dreams that had left her sobbing and shaking.

She reached out and grabbed hold of the headboard. Breathe, she thought urgently. Her hands clenched around the wood and her thoughts rushed in incoharents patterns, flash photography of her dreams, of those two mice on the floor, of the giant mouse as it pulled off its pants.

The voice of clarity inside her said firmly, Cafi, stop. You're having a panic attack, and you need to stop. Get up and go out of the room.

Her eyes scanned every inch of the floor between the bed and door before she was able to put her feet on it. Her entire body trembling, she jerked the door open and walked through it. There was a line of light under the door on the other side of the fireplace; she stumbled to it and beat weakly on the wood.

A second later it opened. Cafi didn't notice the room or the lights or the soft opera coming from a CD alarm clock, all she saw was Marty O'Bach's face as her knees buckled and she fell hard onto the floor.

One ankle ground painfully into her ass. She grabbed at the door way and dug her fingernails so deeply into the wood that she couldn't get them out a moment later. Panic flared up again and she jerked her hard painfully. "Don't," Marty said, crouching beside her. His voice was like satin against her senses. "What's wrong?"

Oh god, the mice. Their little bodies flashed in front of her eyes, the small but heavy masses of their bodies in her hands. Their tiny organs, failing one by one as their legs kicked against the air and their tails twitched.

The world started to go gray. Marty said something she couldn't hear and gently wiggled one of her fingers. A moment later it was loose, and as he started on the second Cafi saw their eyes, their glass ball eyes, deflating and rotting and ooze running down the bridges of their stiffly furred noses.

She shuddered. "Seizure," Marty said, but it was part of a sentence she didn't hear. Her hand was free and he lifted her gently off the floor. Cafi held onto his neck with one arm and blinked rapidly for a moment, resurfacing in reality. Three fingernails on one hand were aching, even worse as they spasmodically closed and sank into the flesh of her palms.

Marty eased her down onto his bed, she could smell the scent of his body on the sheets and the thick pillows. Safe, she told herself. No mice in his bed.

But she looked up and saw him standing above her, the ceiling light just behind his head illuminating his hair and blackening out his face.

All she could see was the black outline of his body. He turned slightly, one hand on his hip, one finger stuck out at an odd angle, and Cafi realized that it wasn't a finger at all.

It was a tail.

The panic rose unstoppably until it reached her mouth, and then she screamed. It was a deep, full-throated scream that took all of her strength and left her laying weakly against the headboard. Her body screamed again, hurting her ears. She begged it to stop but something inside her just kept screaming and screaming, no matter how raw it tore her throat.

The room began to blur again and she felt her eyes roll back in her head as consciousness was sucked away.

Marty didn't have a clue what to do. The girl finally passed out and he leaned against the desk, chest heaving, sweating, utterly freaked out. The only time he'd heard someone scream like that was the night his cousin, Karina, came a hair's bredth from death by slow hemmorage. His eyes traveled to the doorjam. She'd managed to rip a half-inch deep gouge with her unpolished fingernails.

Hesitantly, he stepped forward and touched his fingers to her neck. She had a pulse, she was breathing. Ready at any moment to jump away, he tugged her legs out and arranged her neatly on the bed. Then he drew the blankets up to her chest and stepped back again.

He hadn't realized he had been open to psychic impressions until the torrent hit him. Not just the frantic wave she sent behind her, directed toward the guest bedroom, but something else, a pressure that had abruptly eased when she passed out. Even now, in this uneasy sleep, he could still feel the hot ripples passing through the wall.

Maybe some music would help calm her down when she woke up. He would have chosen a little sweet Mozart for himself, but from the expression on her face when she'd come in he was guessing she wasn't an opera fan. Instead he dug through the shelves of CDs above the desk until he came to a Gary Lamb albulm called "Fallen Angel." It was very gentle, very sappy piano and violin duets that he turned on softly before heading to the kitchen. He decided to leave the lights on and the bedroom door open.

His father had left a list of instructions somewhere. Emergency numbers, what animals needed to be fed, ect. Marty could vaguely recall seeing it a while back, but he couldn't remember what he'd done with it. The mess on the kitchen table was incredible, huge sheets of orchestra scores he'd been working on, amid bowls of sour milk from his constant cereal meals. He cursed himself, shuffled the scores together, and looked for smaller pieces of paper. Amid his liberetto drafts, telephone messages, and napikins he'd shredded while working, was a set of neatly stapled white paper.

He snatched it up and flipped through the pages. Finally, in the last paragraph, he found it.

"Cafi," he muttered, tossing the pages back on the table. "What kind of name is Cafi?"

He was really confused. Somehow the night had changed drastically without his permission or his desire. She'd shown up, that had been more interruption than he'd wanted. He'd been mildly soothed when at least she didn't feel the need to talk though his opera; she may not like it but she was respectful of it.

But he didn't know what to make of this.

He walked back through the living room to the guests room he'd put her in. It was close to the bathroom and he thought she'd feel better here than in one of the upstairs rooms that got cold so easily. He'd completely forgotten that the guest house was ready.

The door was open, the lights on. Her clothes were dotted about the bed, except for several sweaters that had been pitched across the room and onto the desk. Marty glanced around thoughtfully; he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary when he'd made up the bed.

As he turned to go out, he saw a shadow under the edge of the dressed. At first he thought it was a leaf, then his eyes adjusted and he made out the inert form of a mouse. Dead.

Is that it? he wondered, crouching down beside it. She went crazy like that because of a dead mouse?

Maybe he hadn't been around enough girls, but he'd grown up with his female cousins, and they never acted like that. Any one of them would have just grabbed a dust pan, the way he was about to.

As he was sweeping up the mouse, he spotted another one, this time under the desk. Frowning, he scooped it up, too, and then crouched near the floor. He didn't see any more, but he hadn't seen these when he came in earlier.

After tossing the mice out the backdoor into the snow and letting in one of the cats from Circ Gri, Tessa, he fixed a bowl of Cheerio's and sat down in a chair in the living room, from which he had a clear view of the girl sleeping in his bed.

She didn't stir while he ate his dinner, and when he went to for a closer look, he saw that her breathing was deep and even. She was fully asleep now.

He debated a moment before flipping on a soft desk lamp and turning off the overhead. He set the CD player to REPEAT ALL and stretched out on the couch with a thick comforter, letting the fire and the faint strands of music hypnotize him.

He always thought of Shale while he fell asleep. He was really sick of hurting like this, tired of mourning, but he couldn't seem to stop. The pain rose up with the mere mention of her name, and the only thing that made it go away was music pounding through every inch of him. When he laid on the floor and let the kettle drums squeeze his heart, it was the only time he hurt worse than when he thought of her.

He hadn't been able to reach out to anyone since she died. That was the real problem, he knew. She had touched him and known everything, so quickly, so completely. Why bother if he couldn't find that again?

He hummed a little Wagner as he drifted off to sleep.

Cafi woke up covered in sweat. She felt drained, exhausted, and incredibly stupid.

The bed was overly warm but soft. She kicked down the blankets and rubbed her forehead, finding that the pillows pressed against her cheek smelled of sweet wax and peppermint. Sunlight poured through the window at the foot of her bed in rivers of butter yellow.

There was a paino and violin duet playing fron the alarm clock, which read 12:35 p.m. Cafi groaned and sat up, her head throbbing. She was still in Marty's bed, apparently he'd just tucked her in after she collapsed.

Collapsed. Oh god, she thought, what an impression I must have made.

The mice surfaced in her mind and she swallowed thickly, forcing the thought away.

You couldn't have done that last night? she asked herself, but she knew regret was useless. Panic attacks have lives of their own, and no matter how illogical, they're often unstoppable.

She turned off the CD player and stood up. Through the open doorway she could see Marty asleep on the living room couch, body wrapped in a thick cocoon of blankets. A draft ran along the floor and the fire had died to broken coals.

Cafi glanced at the door to the room she'd been shown last night and decided not to risk it. She felt a pang of hunger in her stomach and headed for the kitchen. The O'Bachs wouldn't mind if she made a cup of instant, would they?

Forget instant, all she could find was a pot of strange smelling coffee grinds that she nervously put in the CoffeeMate and turned on. While it was perking, she wandered over to the round wooden table covered in large sheets of paper.

Orchestra score, she saw, running a hand over one. She didn't recognize the language that the lead soprano's part was written in, or the pages of lettered text that were scattered about. A pile of bowls had been stacked precariously next to the sink, and a giant economy bag of Cheereo's sat half-empty on the floor.

The coffee was too strong to drink, and she debated whether to pour this batch down the sink and hide the evidence or just appologize and hope whoever was around would drink it. While she was hefting the pot over the metal basin, she realized Marty was standing in the doorway, watching her.

"Oh," she said. "Hi."

She set the coffee pot down on the counter and cursed herself. "You can throw it out if you want," Marty told her simply. "There's some Folgers in the cupboard above the stove for guests."

His voice was flat, not just unamused but uninterested.

"You don't want some?" Cafi asked, lifting the pot again.

He shook his head and she started pouring. The thick mist of evaporating coffee flushed her face and she had to wipe it afterward with the kitchen towel. Marty continued to stand nearby, watching her without any expression.

"I'm sorry about last night," she said uncomfortably, opening the cupboard near the stove. "There were several dead mice in my room, and I sort of paniced. I don't usually, I'm not one of those girls who starts screaming when they see a spider, I just have a very bad phobia concerning dead mice." She rinsed out the coffee pot and added, "You probably think I'm crazy."

"No." Marty pulled a chair out from the table and slumped in it. "Being afraid of dead mice doesn't make you crazy."

Cafi chuckled. "But hallucinating and passing out does."

He shrugged and picked up a pencil from the mess of papers. For a few minutes he was silent, and then he said hesitantly, "Whenever I go into a hospital, I get sick. Even if I'm just there to visit a friend, I start running a fever and I can't breathe."

"What scares you about them?"

His eyes glazed over a little. "Nothing. I've spent too much time there to be frightened of them any more."

Cafi felt herself begin making mental notes on his condition and suddenly felt guilty. This was what she was here for, to evaluate him and see how she could help him begin healing, but somehow it felt wrong, trecherous. Here he was making polite conversation and she was snatching clues for her diagnosis.

She shook herself and grabbed a grapefruit from a bowl on the counter. As she sat down across from Marty, she noticed that he had taken one of the orchestra scores and was writing on it.

"Are these yours?" she asked in surprise.

He nodded. "Something to pass the time."

Cafi knew about classical music; she'd almost ended up a child prodigy pianist once upon a time, and the amount of work spread out on the table looked like a hell of a lot more than a hobby.

"My father said you were coming here to write books," he mentioned. It sounded like an effort, to find something to say, and he didn't look up from the pages as he spoke.

"I'm supposed to be writing a book for Circle Daybreak."

"About what?"

She hesitated, turning a spoon over in her hand. "How to survive the death of a soulmate."

Marty looked up sharply, and the pencil he was writing with snapped in half. Cafi started, surprised that he could look so calm and so furious at the same time. His eyes drove hard at her.

"You aren't here to to write books," he said very quietly, and his sentence was punctuated sharply when three bowls on the counter suddenly broke to pieces, splashing milk and disentigrating Cheerio's onto the floor.

Something passed over his face. A shadow of disgust, of fury. He stood up and walked out of the kitchen before Cafi could think of a single thing to say. The front door opened and closed seconds later.

So, Marty thought vehemently, he sent someone to fix me. Like I'm a goddamn car and he can just call a mechanic. Broken Heart Repair for Dummies, Mend Your Son in Five Easy Steps.

He didn't know where he was going until he reached the stable. And to think, he fumed as he grabbed a saddle out of the tack room, I let her sleep in my bed. I tossed and turned on the couch all night because she was scared of a few dead mice.

She'd probably want to talk about it later on. She'd apologise. She would say that she didn't want to make him uncomfortable or push, that he should take his time and handle his grief his own way.

I'm not grieving, Marty thought as he bridled Frolicksom Baby. He wedged one foot in the stirrup and swung himself on. I don't know what I'm doing exactly, but it isn't grieving.

There was an incredible theme running through his head that he'd never heard before. He would have gone inside and written it down except that she was there, at his table in the kitchen, the one place he'd always been safe from helpful hands. If he locked himself in his room, his uncles came constantly to check on him, but if he just sat in the kitchen and worked, they all thought he was pursuing some worthy endevor and left him be. Now this girl was here, this girl whose name sounded like a piece of salt water candy, and she was screwing his week of quiet already.

Frolicksom Baby was more frolicksom than usual. The horses prefered the stables to the snow covered fields as a general rule, but they liked to get out and run around once in a while. Marty tightened the reins in his hands and urged her toward the cememtary.

He hadn't gone to Shale's grave often in the past year. He thought of it frequently, of things he wanted to say to her, even if she couldn't hear them. But when he got there, he always found the patch of earth strangly dry and empty.

His mother's grave was different. He could sit and talk to her for hours and not feel strange. Maybe it was because all the memories he had of her were tied to this place, because he had never shared time with her while she was still alive. He didn't miss her, either. He missed the idea of her, but not the woman.

"I don't even know why everyone's so disgusted with me," Marty said without pretext, plopping down in the snow and leaning against the slanted marble headstone. "All I've asked is that they leave me alone so I can work on the opera. They act like I've suddenly shut off my entire life, like I've thrown it all away. When I was sick, they never expected me to do anything except watch TV and listen to recordings. They never complained when I said I just wanted to rest a little while. Now I want to sit down and write complicated orchestra scores, and I'm some kind of under achiever."

He let his head fall back against the marble and stared up into the dirty gray sky. "Somehow I thought being healthy would be more fun."

His butt was already frozen, and he'd barely been here a few moments. He'd need to get up in a minute, but he wasn't looking forward to returning to the house. Should have thought of that before you left without a coat, the back of his head muttered.

"It's weird, Mom. Last night I got that feeling I get when one of my spells goes really well, when I strikes one of those natural chords. I thought, It's going to get better from here out. It's going to be easier. But then she showed up, and I don't want to do the therapist thing. I don't want to gush to a total stranger. I can't even gush to Dad or Uncle Peter. Aside from you, the only person I think might understand is Nick, and he left years ago. So I'm stuck here, and nobody seems to get that I know what I need, and it's to be left alone.

"Anyway, if she thinks she can fix me, she's nuts. I can fix myself."

He caught up with Frolicksom Baby a hundred yards back toward the house and remounted. She trotted quickly toward the barn, neighing nervously, and Marty studied the sky. Clouds on the horrizion, probably more snow tonight.

He brushed Frolicksom off and returned the equiptment to the tack room before, swinging by the mailbox and then heading toward the house. He was shivering now, and he couldn't feel his arms to the elbow, but he still hurt. That was what his family didn't understand. No matter now nice they were to him, or how much he threw himself into their activities, he was still going to hurt. The sharp-edged ache inside would still be there, and he wasn't sure he wanted it to go.

The last thing I want, he thought as he opened the front door of his home, is to forget her.

Cafi was sitting on the stairs, cheeks flushed with anger. "Look," she started, before Marty even had time to take off his wet shoes, "you can bitch and moan all you like. I'm not going to deny you that. I'm not going to force you onto the self-help tract and make you read Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul or anything. I came here because I have a book due and a lot of my own problems to work out, and because your father offered me a place to stay where I could get away from it all. If you want to sit down and talk about it with somebody who knows, I'll be glad to, but don't stomp around like I can't possibly understand how you feel and I'm just crimping your style by being here, because I can and I'm not."

He stepped back, stunned. He hadn't been yelled at once in the last year. Given pitying looks, listened to frustrated sighs, plenty, but no one had yelled at him.

She's really angry, he realized.

"I didn't mean to offend you," he said weakly.

Cafi nodded. "I know." She ran a hand through her hair, cooling. "You're pissed at your father for manipulating you. I would be, too. But I won't push, Marty. If you don't want my help, I've got better things to do than try to force it on you."

He wondered if she meant it, and decided that she did. She was probably too young to be a really good liar; only lamia were born with those kinds of instincts. "My father's out of town," he told her. "I thought he had sent you here to fix me while he was away."

"So that he could come home and have his son back to normal?" she asked, sending shockwaves like arrows into Marty's chest. She smiled bitterly. "Yeah, that's what all parents want. When the kids hit the teen years, when their lose their minds, when their soulmates die. They just want things to be normal again."

She looked up at him, and shrugged. "What are we supposed to say? Yeah, I wish I could go back, too? I didn't choose this and I don't like and I'd give my right arm to wake up in the morning and not feel like dying?"

He leaned against the back of the door and slid slowly until he could sit on the floor. The armful of mail he'd finally picked up fell in a wet pile beside him. Hesitantly, he said, "You've...lost your..."

Cafi scooted down a few steps so she wasn't towering above him. Her voice fell, soft and confidential, empty of anger now. "Three years ago. He died in a car accident."

"Were you there?"

"No. I was at home doing school work and all of a sudden I felt like my heart had ruptured. There was this terrible pain in my chest, I thought I was having a heart attack or a stroke or something. After a couple of minutes it started to ease off, but I felt so disoriented, like I didn't know where I was. Everything was different, everything inside me was being pulled into this suctioned funnel. I didn't know why but I started crying. This overwhelming feeling of loss hit me, and about an hour later his mom called."

She did know, he marvled. She truly understood what it felt like. The anger and resentment he'd felt when he realized why she was really here simply melted away. "How long had you known him?"

"Eight years."

"Was it long enough?"

Her eyes lifted to meet his and she smiled sadly. "I don't think it's ever long enough. I run a support group for people living without their soulmates, and nobody there has ever told me that they had enough time. Maybe they just can't admit it, because then they'd feel like they were betraying the other person's memory, saying that they'd had enough of them. I used to worry about that. I'd feel guilty every time I laughed, over everything anything made me even the slightest bit happy." She sniffled and shrugged again. "But guilty is a shitty way to live. I figured that out after about a year."

"So that's what I'm supposed to be doing," Marty interjected, pangs of anger rising again. Here we go. "That's step number one, getting rid of guilt?"

Cafi started to speak and then stopped. More thoughtfully, she said, "I used to think so. Up until a couple of months ago, I had this whole system for how to let go and move on. It was really popular, worked for a lot of people. I got a lot of respect for a sixteen year old kid."

"And now?"

"Now I think maybe I was fooling myself. I worked so hard eradicating him from my life that I forgot to live it. Lately everything has started to feel so empty. Do you feel like that?"

They were sitting only a few feet apart, on the cold floor between the front door and the stairs. Marty paused to wonder at it, but didn't linger long enough to worry. So they were talking too intimately for new acquaintences and she was telling him more than he ever would have asked. Her decision.

"Empty?" he repeated. "No. I feel sad, and kind of lost. I wasn't expecting to live this long, it's all very confusing. But...."

He glanced at her. She was watching him carefully, but her eyes showed no signs of judgement.

"It's like I'm standing at the edge of a pool," he said. "There's all this water and I could just jump in, but I'm not sure I want to. Like I might be too tired to keep swimming."

Cafi nodded slowly. "I felt like that until a couple months ago. Then some fatalistic, suicidal urge to plunge into the world took me over. And I feel guilty for it."

"Why?"

"Because," she answered after a moment's thought, "I want to live without him."

"It's what he would have wanted, right? That's what my father keeps telling me."

Cafi smiled and laughed a little. "I don't even know what that means. Would have wanted? When, if he had died and gotten to leave instructions? Are they saying that's what he wants now? I don't think Jeremy wants anything, he's dead, so what he wants doesn't affect me anyway." She laughed again. "God, I'm really not supposed to be saying this stuff to you."

"Why not?"

"Because you're hurting, and you're trying to recover, and I've found that crass remarks don't generally help with that sort of thing. You want comfort, not sarcasm." Lines of hurt came back into her face. She pressed her eyes shut. "Sometimes I think the only way to live without them is to betray their memories. Joy is too disrespectful, otherwise."

She rested her elbows on her knees and put her head in her hands. Marty felt a sudden rush of warmth toward her that he didn't understand. She was a stranger but he felt so close to her, that they shared something horrible that was lessened in the sharing.

He lay his hand on her knee and she looked up, surprised. "Sorry," she said.

"For what?"

"Going off about my problems when yours are bigger."

"Why are mine bigger?"

"Because you're hurting and I'm just whining about my psychological hogwash conditions."

"You're hurting," Marty said softly.

Cafi sniffeled again. "I suppose I am," she agreed.

They worked for a few hours in the evening. Cafi curled up in an arm chair by the fire and Marty spread his scores out on the coffee table, and they concentrated for a time on their various projects in companionable silence.

Cafi was disgusted with herself. Marty had enough to deal with without her dumping her circle-running thoughts on him. She was supposed to be the care-taker here, the one who guided him and acted as his rock. If this kept up they would probably end up clinging to each other like two lost swimers in a storm.

She tried to start on the book, but nothing came ("Chapter One: Getting it Off Your Chest. Chests aren't good places to keep things.") except for revisions of her conversation with Marty. What she should have said, and more importantly, shouldn't have said. She watched him while she played with her pen, watched him sitting on the floor with his pencil making quick, decisive motions. He composed without a piano or even a keyboard, and the notes seemed to flow like water from a spring.

Her hand started moving. Dear Marty, she wrote. If I could tell you one thing and know that your would really believe it, it would be that there are no guidelines. We can try to fit ourselves into these plans the world has, the educational plan, the weight loss plan, the grieving plan, but those are things that may be part of our paths, they aren't part of ourselves.

She paused, watching him again. He had laid his head on the coffee table, but was still writing on one hand.

She rubbed her head and put the legal pad down. She wasn't getting anywhere, and she wasn't going to be able to write this book if she'd lost faith in her own methods. You're the self help guru of Circle Daybreak, she reminded herself. You should be able to write this stuff in your sleep.

Marty noticed at twelve-thirty that Shale had fallen asleep in her chair. He wasn't sure what to do; waking her up and making her trek through the snow to the guest house seemed rotten. After a few minutes deliberation, he pulled the lever on the side of the chair, stretching it out under her, and then smoothed a blanket over her.

He put his scores in his bedroom, on the undersized desk that was so insufficient for this sort of work, sat down on the bed, and realized he was lonely. The other Chimera had been so forcefully helpful that it had been exhausting for him and he'd slipped into a routine of utter solitude whenever possible. But Cafi's presence was...easy. Soothing. She didn't ask and she didn't expect. They could be alone together.

Restless, he went into the front hall and gathered the mail up off the floor. He'd failed to collect it in the several days his family had been away, it was really piling up between all the catalogs, bills, and other oddities that arrived.

In the kitchen was a plastic shelf stack where mail could be organized. One shelf for this house, one for each of the other two houses in Tata Acasa. Circ Gri's mail went into a plastic crate beside the refridgerator. As Marty was pitching magazines and envelopes about, he noticed a letter addresed to him.

With a butter knife from the sink he opened it.

We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as a Sarvieniena Operatic Voice for 1999. The members of the selection committee were very impressed with the compositions you entered in our contests, and delight in informing you that two of your pieces, Asta seara in un turn and Tragedie la se crapa cu ziua will be performed at the Sarvieniena Opera House on January 1 and 2, 1999.

Marty folded the letter up without reading the rest. He felt sick, sabatoged, self-destructing. He'd known when he applied that he would be accepted; how many people under twenty-one wrote operas in this contry to beging with?

There were three plane tickes and an itinerary inside. Marty put it all back in the envelope and went to sit on the couch in the living room. He spent a lot of time there, thinking or staring at the empty fire place. Tonight Cafi was curled up in a chair, but that didn't bother him. She had a light, fluttery snore that was just loud enough so that he knew she was still breathing.

Why am I so scared? he wondered, watching her inert form. I'll finally be able to hear the pieces sung aloud instead of only in my head. Sarvieniena is huge, this is the ticket to a college scholarship, a name in opera, a serious career as a composer. It could all happen.

The idea of leaving Tata Acasa horrified him. He wasn't sure why, if he was afraid to abandon the house itself or Shale's and his mother's graves, or if it was just a leap he wasn't ready to make. There was safety here, as well as comfort and monotony. He took no risks sitting on the couch all day.

A tiny smile crept to his lips, feeling foriegn and chilly. He thought, You could hear it.....

Sliding onto the floor, he reached for one of his discarded notebooks and a pen. He flipped to a blank page and clairified the lines into an even measure, wrote an alto clef sign and then scribbled a series of quarter notes. An abrupt series of slurred thirty-seconds and he found himself throwing in another instrument. His pen dripped over the pages, spotting out occassionaly as he rubbed the ball point dry. Marty licked it and went on fervently, flipping one sheet and then another, no longer bothering with measure seperations or marking the key signature. There were accidentals everywhere, it felt like he was sharping every other note and double flatting each third. The chords fell apart into twin double stops, painful for the fingers and lovely for the ear. Misshapen f's and p's marked volume as he drew shaky creshendos and stark, piercing accents. The notes rose and fell like a child's first attempt at graphing, but to Marty they were nothing but music itself, no notation, no paper and pen. Simply the expression of something unatainable turned to tangible evidence of its existence.

When he was finished, he turned back twenty pages and realized that he hadn't just written a little duet, he'd composed the theme for an entire opera. Those two violas said everything that needed to be said, and he didn't even know the story yet.

Inspiration was a weird thing.

He frowned and then groaned. He hadn't even finished one opera and he was already starting on another. Well, there was only one way to do this. He'd have to finish Tatiana si Andrei before he began seriously thinking about composing anything else.

But the thougts were so close to surfacing. He'd have to finish Tatiana tonight.

Marty was crying when Cafi woke up. His hands were trembling, she saw, and he was crouched awkwardly on the hardwood floor, drowning in those huge sheets of paper. There was no order to anything, just him curled in the sunlight with tears streaming down his cheeks, making shaky marks on his pages.

"Marty?" she asked, sitting up. She must have fallen asleep in the chair, and he'd covered her sometime in the night. It was early morning now, maybe seven o'clock. The light coming through the colored windows was so faint she couldn't believe he was writing without a lamp on.

He turned his damp face up to her, and shook his head. His eyes shut and opened, shut and opened, never smoothing his vision as they should have, never helping making the world easier to bear when he looked again. There were a dozen pencils scattered at his feet, each with a tip worn absolutely flat into the wood. A can of fresh ones was spilled on the coffee table.

"Have you been up all night?" Cafi asked, sliding carefully onto the floor. She didn't want to step on any of his papers.

He just shook his head and reached for another page. They were full, she realized, all these strips of paper were absolutely covered with tiny notations. Words in a foriegn language--Italian? Latin? It looked like a combination--topped the lines like curclie-cue borders.

She glanced at Marty again. Jesus, one of his hands was bleeding. He'd worn the skin off the edge of his finger; blood ran slowly down to the tip of the pencil and colored his notes as he drew them.

No wonder his father had called her, if this had happened before. No wonder he produced so much if composition had become his touchstone.

"Marty," she said firmly. He shook his head a third time and tossed the pencil down, wiping his bloody finger on his shirt. Then he grabbed a fresh scrib and returned to the page.

She crawled through the sea to him, making a path between the papers as neatly as she could. "It's time to stop," she told him. "You need to stop now."

He was beyond understanding. His eyes were shadowed and sickly, the soft green bleeding out blue at the edges. Cafi had never seen anything like it, those tendrils of cerulean waving over the whites of a person's eyes.

The idea that slapping someone who was hysterical would make them less hysterical was bullshit. Cafi had actually tried it, twice, and found that the only effect it had on a victim was to make them even more hysterical. Not only were they unable to cope with the situation, but now someone was beating them, too.

So she didn't slap Marty. She laid a gentle hand on his arm and rubbed it. "Marty, it's time for you to stop writing now. You've done pleanty enough for tonight."

He shook her hand away and then brushed at the tears on his face. His lips parted, whispering something Cafi couldn't make out.

"What?" she asked kindly.

"Sunt singur," he said again. "Singur, singur. Sunt singur."

"You want a cigarette?" she asked, surprised.

He ingored her, and she saw a hard-cover Romanian-English dictionary on the floor near him. Romanian? Was that even still a language?

She picked it up and flipped through to the S's. Soont? Syunt? She had no idea how to spell the words she'd heard him speak, and after a few minutes, she put the dictionary down and placed her hands over his, stiffling their movement.

"Marty," she said. "It's time to stop."

He breathed quickly for a moment, like an animal unsure how to escape. His eyes were averted but Cafi knew he was watching her, waiting to see what she'd do. Without warning, the dictionary jumped up from the floor, launched itself two feet straight into the air, and smashed Cafi in the side of the face.

She felt as though she'd been hit by a car, tumbling backwards as the dictionary hit the floor nearby with a giant bang. Her jaw exploded with pain and two teeth knocked together hard enough to flake iron.

"Sunt singur," Marty repeated, and went back to work.

Cafi lay on her back, breathing too fast and hard, her jaw throbbing. She scrambled away like a crab on her hands and heels, crunching paper without regard until she could stand up a safe distance away from him.

Inside, she was terrified. Her throat had closed too much for her to speak. The incident with the bowls she had talked herself out of the day before, saying that the counter was jolted when Marty stomped one of his feet or something. She had refused to believe it was his doing, even though she'd heard the stories. Ash Redfern was in her support group, she'd called him before she flew out here, and his words had been a warning.

"I've only seen him once since it happened, but he didn't look right. I felt like there was something wild inside him that was going to get out and come after me, and whenever I tried to go near him, something would break or fall over or I'd trip. I tripped four times that day."

She'd heard the stories, of course, about the Chimera boy back from the dead. No one knew what to make of him. Supposedly, he'd quenched the Circle Dyabreak's Midsummer fire at the stroke of midnight, without touching it. Without sand or water. Just glanced in that direction, and the flames had died away. She'd assumed it was hogwash, that people were exagerating.

But fifteen pound dictionaries didn't jump off the floor on their own, and they didn't hit her as squarely as this one had.

Marty didn't just need help because he was sad. He needed help because he was dangerous.

The guest house was small and lovely, like her room had been. Cafi had managed to grab her things from the spare room and get past Marty without inciting his wrath before bungling through the snow to the cottage-like house nearby.

He had mentioned the day before that she was welcome to stay there if she liked, but she said she'd rather be in the main house where there were other people. There's no one else, Marty had told her. They all left for the Yule celebration in Arizona. It's just me here.

She couldn't leave him alone in that state. She couldn't stay with him and be safe. She didn't know what the hell to do.

There were two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchenette. Cafi dumped herself on the living room futon and turned on the television, needing a break in the silence. She found a Big Red in the refridgerator and poured it into a glass before taking a long drink. She had worked with really angry people before, she understood that they could be dangerous. But they had always been at least a little rational. She could always say, Calm down, I'm not the one you're angry at. Here's a punching bag, go at it. They'd actually dressed a punching bag up in one of Carl's dead wife's outfits before he beat it up.

Marty didn't know what was going on, hadn't recognized her as a friend. She wasn't even sure he had consciously known what he was doing with the dictionary. The way he had been so rivited to that paper, as if nothing else existed in the world...

There was a letter on the counter, addressed to her. Cafi put down her glass, licking the sweetness off her lips, and tore it open. Inside was a single sheet of white paper, neatly typed.

Cafi lay the letter slowly back on the counter, taking note of the phone number written at the bottom. A shame she hadn't found this earlier, her chin might not be swelling right now.

He had carefully failed to mention that Marty didn't need to use his hands when throwing things.

Cafi sat down on the couch and laughed mirthlessly. "Well," she said aloud to herself, "you wanted to try a new approach to therapy. You wanted to forget the conventional twelve-step program. Here you go. He's a lunatic."

Mathias had said the episodes were untriggered. The last she could remember, he had been working on his papers, and then she'd fallen asleep. Now he was still working on his paper, but he hadn't been like this when she drifted off. What had changed in the night to make him freak out?

He couldn't tell her, of course, the same way she hadn't been able to tell him what was wrong after she found the dead mice. What did I really need then? she wondered, tentatively recalling the incident.

I needed to scream.

And she had screamed until she passed out, and felt better when she woke up. Maybe Marty just needed to do whatever he was doing until it was over, ride the wave out. Still, she didn't like leaving him alone, especially knowing that he bleeding all over himself.

After putting her clothes away in one of the bedrooms, disgusted with herself the entire time because she knew she was stalling, she buckled down and went outside. She made her way back through the snow to the house, entering the front door slowly. Marty was just where she had left him, on the living room floor, face pressed close to the page. She walked carefully around him, putting plenty of space between them, and picked up the trecherous dictionary that had been used as a weapon against her.

Using an open notebook from the coffee table, and one of the fresh pencils on the floor, she strung together a few sentences. Beneath each one, she wrote out a careful Enligsh spelling from the pronunciation guide.

Touching Marty's shoulder to get his attention, which he didn't have any intention of giving, she said, "Tau deget este singerez." Your finger is bleeding.

He turned his head in her direction, not meeting her eyes but aware of her presence. His hand paused and he looked at his finger. "Nu stium," he told her hoarsely. "Nu face rani."

Cafi had no idea what any of that meant, except that she thought he had said No at least once. "Ai nevoie de ajutor?" she asked. Do you need help?

He shook his head and frowned, pushing her slightly away from him. "Mergi departe."

She waited to see if there was more, hoping he might slip into English. Instead, he glanced at her darkly, and said again, "Mergi departe. Merg!"

Cafi leaned back on her heels, moving further away but not really going anywhere. "Nu," he snapped. "Merg, catea, sau omora tu!"

Leave him alone, Mathias had said, and Marty was shouting at her in a manner that she thought might quickly become slapping. She stood up and retreated to the far side of the room, where she sank into a wicker rocker and waited for him to snap out of it.

She had to wait a long time.

"Dammit," Marty muttered, slamming his finger in the door as he came out of the bathroom. He felt the bone bend and saw that he had cut right through the flesh and was bleeding.

He stumbled into the living room and saw Cafi standing behind the couch. "I caught my finger in the door," he said, gesturing. "I'm going to get some ice."

She followed him into the kitchen silent, and watched as he wrapped severeal ice cubes in a cloth and pressed them to the finger, which was swelling and turning a dark purple.

Marty noticed a bruise on Cafi's chin. "What happened?" he asked, "to your cheek?"

She exhaled a long breath and look at him searchingly. "Do you remember any of the last twenty-four hours?"

He suddenly felt nervous for no real reason. "You fell asleep in the chair, so I covered you with a blanket, and then I went to bed. I worked on the opera for a little while earlier, you went to the guest house to write your book. Then I shut my finger in the door."

Cafi shook her head slowly. "That's not what happened, Marty."

"What do you mean?"

"I fell asleep, and you covered me up. Then you worked all night on your opera, and when I tried to make you stop this morning, you wouldn't speak English, and you hit me in the head with a book."

He stepped back. "I don't remember that."

"Apparently you don't remember a lot of things. There's a letter from you father in the guest house, saying that you have....episodes, I think he called them. Fits. You won't speak to anyone and if they come near you you use your psychic powers to hurt them. Like you did with me and that book."

"I don't have the kind of power your talking about," he told her desperately. "I couldn't lift a book. I can barely lift a feather."

"Why would I make something like this up?" She ran a hand through her hair. "Marty, look. I know I said I wouldn't push, but I didn't realize then that you were...dangerous."

"I'm not dangerous," he cried. "Can't I just be sad for a while? Can't I figure this out my own way? I'm sorry if I'm not living up to your twelve-step time-table, but that's not the route I want to take."

Her gaze was intent. "Then tell me the route you do want to take, and I'll take it with you. This is serious. You did that to your finger rubbing it raw against a pencil non-stop for twenty hours, then shutting it in a door, and you don't even remember."

Marty sank into a chair. "How is that possible?" he asked. "I remember all of today and last night. I even remember what I deamed about."

"The mind is a powerful thing we're just beginning to understand," Cafi said. "I'm sure you have the imagination to create an extra day for yourself."

She reached out and put her hand over his. "Your dad says it's been getting worse the last couple of months. It if keeps going like this, he's going to put you in a mental hospital."

Marty's thoughts spun. "Why didn't he tell me this was going on?"

"He was afraid that it was some kind of cry of help, and if you saw that it wasn't working you'd stop."

"But I didn't even know I was doing it!"

"That's probably why it didn't stop," she said with a softening smile. "And you only speak in Romanian while you're having these fits. To me, that signifies that you have a lot that you're hiding but you want to talk about."

Maybe, he thought. Maybe it would be good to get some of this crap off my chest. He nodded finally.

"Okay. Why don't I make some dinner, and you and I can sit down and talk for a while? And whatever you tell me, even if it turns out you're a mass murder, I won't repeat. I swear."

Marty hadn't killed Shale, but he smiled gratefully anyway. "Thank you."

"So. Tell me how you met."

"I was in the hospital, dying. I'd been sick ever since I was born, it was a genetic thing, and I was pretty sure I was going to die that night. It was the Spring Equinox. and Thea Harman had just left. I was trying to say a few prayers before I went, but suddenly there was this girl in a silly white dress in my room. She asked me if I wanted to live and I said yes, although I was pretty confused about what was going on. She touched me and there was this instant bond between us, I felt like....like we could rest together. You know what I mean? How sometimes you sleep and sleep and never wake up feeling any better?"

"I know."

"When Shale touched me, I felt like if we just lay down together, we wouldn't just sleep, we would rest. Really deep rest, and it would supliment us in all the little, necessary ways we foget about.

"But anyway, I was dying, and when she touched me, she transfered a life to me. It's a big, complicated thing that I'd rather not get into, but she had the ability to transfer lives, and I got one from a man down the hall."

"What happened then?"

"Shale flew up into the air and through the hospital wall, and I passed out. When I woke up, I was healed and she had vanished. I felt so good, so much better that I ever had before. When I think back to that day, what I remember the most is how amazing it felt to be able to breathe."

"You had asthma?"

"Cystic fibrosis. But Shale cured me. It was amazing. I had never been able to run because I couldn't catch my breath. And this meant I wouldn't die. I had really been prepared for it, but suddenly I had a whole life streaching out in front of me. Little kids change what they want to be when they grow up about every ten minutes, and I think I was like that that day. I wanted to do everything and be everyone. I had a chance.

"Then the TAQ team showed up. They're three vampires from Circle Daybreak, and they told me that someone needed to be healed desperately, and that I had to help them find the girl who had healed me. I was pretty eager to find her myself, so I didn't argue."

"And did you find her?"

"Yes. Her name was Shale Eyre, and she was living at a kid's shelter. Quinn, one of the TAQ team guys, threatened that if she didn't heal this other girl, then he would torture her. He offered her money if she helped. She said she wanted to think about it and I went into her bedroom with her for a while. That was when I really realized what she was, when I was able to see her memories. She'd had such a hard life, really brutal. I think she felt like no one loved her.

"Of course, I loved her immediately. I'd never been in love before, but that time I couldn't help it. I went with her to heal the girl.

"While we were driving there, we were attacked. Me, Shale, the TAQ team, and her friend, Griffin. A man named Ravenal took us to a huge building in the middle of the desert and made Shale pick which one of us would give our lives of save this girl. She chose Quinn."

"Did she kill him?"

"No. There was a lot of craziness going on, a lot of confusion. Things didn't go according to Ravenal's plan, or anyone else's. The girl was healed, but Griffin and Ravenal both died. I really thought, even at that point, that Shale and I were going to make it out of there. Now I think she must have known she was going to die, from the things she said."

"What sort of things?"

"That she was glad she had met me. That she had a bad feeling. Little things. Maybe I knew, too, but I felt so...hopeful. My old life had died that morning, now I was some one else with a healthy body and a perfect soulmate. I believed that once we left that place the whole world would be new just the same as I was.

"Shale was shot in the hallway while we were trying to get Quinn. He had been skinned, it was pretty brutal. I was in the room and I saw Ash shoot the doctor who was skinning him, and then I heard a shot from the hallway and.....I was flooded with pain. My own body. I knew instantly what had happened, that she was lost and that was unchangable. I had no way to get back to her. I went out into the hallway and sat down next to her body. She had been shot once in the chest, right over the heart, and her eyes were closed. I still don't know why they were closed, she must have died almost instantly and I know nobody touched her before I did. Maybe she was in the middle of a blink.

"I started to hyperventilate. Ash went hysterical. Quinn was screaming. There were all these androids all over the place-"

"Androids?"

"Yeah. I know it sounds strange, but the girl Shale was saving built robots that she called her children. Ravenal turned out to be one of them, although we didn't find that out until after he died.

"I guess Shale dying just sort of pulled away the last rock I was standing on. The whole world had changed twice in one day. I had been through so much, I couldn't take any more. By the time the paramedics had arrived I was just numb. I couldn't feel a thing. Every emotion got sucked into this void inside me, or passed over my head life vapor. You know it's there, but you can't seem to get close enough to touch it."

"When did that change?"

"Not for a long time. Two months, at least. I went home afterward, and held the funeral, but I really didn't feel anything. I cried because I knew I was supposed to and it creeped people out that I didn't, but I didn't really feel it. I knew at the time that I was repressing things, but I thought that if I let it all come over me, I would get crushed. Then I wrote an article about what happened, and after it was published I began to feel disgusted with myself."

"Why disgusted?"

"Because I was such a perfect picture of text-book grief survival. I felt like I hadn't given her death the mourning it deserved."

"Do you think it's possible that your episodes now are caused by a need to engage in more demonstrative....maybe even explosive mourning?"

"It's possible. I wanted a tribute to her, you know? To let the world know that I was broken without her. But at the same time, I knew no one wouldn't understand. It was something I needed to keep to myself."

"How do you feel about her now?"

"I....It's not just her. I'm completely lost. I don't know what to do with a life I wasn't expecting, and I don't know how to begin planning for one. Everyone else expects me to be an ideal child, because I never acted up when I was younger. They don't understand. I didn't see the point in acting up, because I knew I was going to die, and it would only make things harder for them.

"I wish Shale were here because I need her support, somebody to lean on who could really understand what I'm feeling. I think about her too much."

"Too much?"

"More than I should if I want to forget her."

"What makes you say you have to forget her?"

"It's just too hard to live thinking of her all the time, wishing she were here. I don't want to feel like this anymore. I got a letter today, saying that one of the pieces I've composed is going to be performed. Two, actually. I'd like to go, but I feel like I don't have the strength."

"Physically or emotionally?"

"Emotionally. Seeing something that intense would be a kind of sensory overload. But on the other hand, maybe I could just make a clean break from this whole mourning thing."

"Have you tried that?"

"I tried to wake up one morning and pretend she had never been alive. It worked for about twenty minutes, but afterward I felt guilty for hours."

"Guilty?"

"I don't understand it. Back to the mourning thing I guess. That I haven't given her enough."

"Could you feel that way because she died and you didn't? Survivor's grief is a real disorder."

"Maybe. Sometimes it seems as superficial as something I've talked myself into, but a lot of times I feel like there's something wrong with me on deeper levels."

"Wrong in what sense?"

"Broken? Missing, warped. That I'm fading out of this world and into another. The music is a nice distraction."

"Do you know the difference between a distraction and an escape?"

"Not really."

"An escape is an attempt to pretend to exist differently. A distraction is an interlude with awareness and acceptance of actual reality."

"Oh."

"I think that your fits are escapes, not distractions. You want to pretend you exist differently."

"That I'm happy without her?"

"Is that what you really want?"

"Well, not if I could have anything."

"What would you want then?"

"I'd want her here."

"Of course."

"But I also think I could live without her. If I had the chance to say goodbye. Not just one of those one-sided goodbyes next to graves, they don't work for me."

"Why not?"

"It isn't real."

"Are there other ways of saying goodbye that you think would be more effectual?"

"Aside from in person? I've tried it with the music. I wrote a scene where I imagined myself saying goodbye to her. It's one of the pieces being performed in New York."

"Would it help you to go see it?"

"It might."

"Tell you what. Let's set a goal. If we don't achieve it, no big deal, we'll start over with a new goal. Let's see if you can emotionally prepare yourself to say goodbye to Shale in every way on the night of the performance. How far away is it?"

"Thirteen days."

"Good, that's a good time frame to work out of. Until then, you're going to concentrate on coming full circle, discecting your time with her, understanding how it effected you, what it gave you, what it took, and how to accept it as part of you life. Then, at the performance, when you watch that scene, it should be the culmination of your goodbye. Afterward, you will be freed from all debts to her, all obligations, all sorrows.

"You'll be completely free."

It was dark when they finished. Marty was surprised to see that he felt a little better, but Cafi looked absolutely exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot and when she spoke a few moments later, her words were slurred.

"Do you mind if I just crash here? I really don't feel like walking all the way to the guest house."

"No," Marty said quickly. "That's fine. Let me grab a blanket for you."

She was already asleep by the time he covered her up, face half-hidden by a curtain of dark blond hair. Marty watched her a moment before retreating upstairs to take a shower.

His finger bled a little in the water, but the swelling had gone down and he could move it again. He dried himself off, slipped into a terry-cloth robe, and walked to the kitchen. His opera was stacked neatly on the table.

He leafed through the pages, stunned at how many more there were than the last time he worked on it. Cafi was right; he had gone into a delerium and written most of the third act. This wasn't a few hours of work, it was at least a day and a night. He noticed that as the act progressed, his handwriting changed, becoming more and more tightly spaced.

The music was beautiful, better than anything else he had written so far. He could hear it in his head, and found to his surprise that he had increased the oboe part dramatically. There were solos here he had never heard before, not even in his mind late at night.

He stood in the living room doorway and watched Cafi for a few minutes. The line of her lower lip was beautifully delicate, in fact all of her was shaped as if from porecelain and then iced with cinnimon freckles before being fired. She was lovely, not in a stunning way, but her face was the sort he wouldn't mind looking at every day.

Marty felt guilt send a frisson through his chest. It was a reaction he'd had since he was twelve years old, a feeling that reminded him he had no right to fall in love with any one because he would inevitable hurt them when he died.

Of course, dying had seemed just around the corner for so many years. He hadn't pushed his family away because it would only make the loss harder for them, but he had made sure not to add to his list of survivors.

Now he was alone in the house with Cafi, and this was the first time he'd felt like this since Shale died. Not some flirty crush--he'd never felt that--but a sincere attraction. He wanted to understand who she was and what she was about. How she managed to hold on when she must feel as lost as he did.

Even if he allowed himself to care about her, she would never be the one. The one was dead.

Cafi's breathing suddenly quickened, and she rolled her head sharply to one side. Marty saw her hand tighten around the corner of the blanket.

"Don't," she murmured. "No, get away from me. I won't let you do this again."

He took a few steps forward, hesitant. "Cafi?" he called.

Her voice grew louder. "Please, sweet Jesus, don't do it. Please don't. Please, I'm begging you."

Tears began leaking from under her closed eyes, and her arms flew up over her head, the wrists pressed together at if bound. She trashed, kicking at the covers, crying.

"Cafi," Mary said, moving to her side. He touched a hand to her shoulder and she screamed weakly, struggling against phantoms.

"Somebody help me! The rats!"

He shook her. "Cafi, wake up."

Her body moved without warning. It seemed to Marty that an invisible force grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her body straight outward. She hung suspended in the air a second before collapsing with her legs thrown apart.

Something malevolent spiced the air, he could feel it. "Be gone," he whispered firmly, continuing to shake Cafi.

A painful attack began on his lungs, on the organs whose frailty had plauged him for years. He gathered himself a moment and sent a web of power spinning out from the palm of his left hand.

The air around him slowly cooled, and Cafi's eyes flickered open. Her face was wet, eyes large, but from the glaze over them he knew she couldn't see him. "Please stop, Jeremy," she whispered, and then her expression collapsed into twisted sobs. Her eyes cleared as if cry cleared the haze from them, and she saw Marty leaning above her.

She reached up and he wrapped his arms around her instinctively, taking the blanket with him when he carried her to the couch and sat down.

She buried her face in his shoulder, striving to calm her ragged breathing. "It's all right," Marty promised. "You're safe."

"It was the rats," she whispered. "The dead rats that come to my bed."

Marty stiffened. "What?"

"They....they come to my bed and hold me down, and their rat tails wrap around my ankles so that I can't move while they...."

He was relieved when she broke off. What happened next was obvious enough. No wonder she had been so terrified the other night when she found the two dead mice in her room.

"I thought I would be safe here."

"You are. It's just a dream."

"I haven't had it in so long."

"It's just because of the mice you found, they brought back memories."

She smelled of fresh cotton and lavendar, and her weight was comforting on Marty's lap. "Shh. I let the cat in, there won't be any more mice."

"I'm sorry," she said. She had begun to calm, but was still holding onto him for dear life.

"There's nothing to be sorry for. And after how I behaved this morning, this seems like nothing. We all have nightmares."

She didn't let go, even after her breathing had evened out and she was able to stop crying. "It's been a long time," she told him, the words spoken against his neck, "since anyone has held me like this."

Discomfort lodged like a cannon ball in his stomach.

"No," Cafi went on softly, "I don't mean anything. I'm not hitting on you. It's just strange. This is normal between normal people, but once you lose a soulmate, suddenly you don't want anyone touching you. That's how I was after Jeremy died. Sometimes I'm so embrassed as how completely I loved him, it seems pathetic."

Marty didn't know what to say, he had felt the same way. People were always happy for couples, until they broke up. Then anyone who couldn't let go was considered pathetic, just as Cafi had said.

But he wondered why she had said Jeremy's name when she was begging the rats not to rape her.

Her fingers tangled in his wet hair, and he shivered. She was right, no one had touched him like this since before Shale died. In the few hours they had spent together, trapped in that bedroom in Ravenal's compound, they had been too amazed at finding each other to be concerned with anything remotely sexual. He could still feel her hands on his back and chest, but that was as far as it went.

Now he was slumped on the couch, his body wrapped around Cafi's, and her words and the way she held him confused him. She swore she wasn't asking for anything, but her grip begged to be drawn closer. Safety, she seemed to say. I need to be safe with you.

Their breathing slipped into a pattern against each other. Marty stopped worrying and closed his eyes. He had been right when he said Cafi was hurting; they were equally pained. It wasn't fair that either one of them be denied comfort.

"Does their being dead mean we have to stop living?" he asked.

She lay bonelessly against him. "I don't know," she replied. "Are we obligated to ignore every love that doesn't equal theirs?"

Age old questions. Neither of them had answers, but it was easier to contemplate the issues together. Marty drew the blankets around them, cutting off the flow of cold air that came between the couch cushions. He wanted to say something but could think of nothing. He wanted to say that he loved her but knew it was impossible. He had only known her two days.

Then again, he had only known Shale one.

Shale Tatiana Eyre lifted her head and looked around.

The room was warm, that she noticed first. Skin was a sudden sensation, returned, revived, and she rubbed her bare arms, smiling. Muscles, tendons, bones. Teeth.

The recent past meant nothing, was insignificant. She knew that without having to search for it, and felt confident in the understanding. She was here for a purpose, she was on a mission, and when it was over she would return.

She didn't concentrate on the past.

The room was warm, and also dim. She could see easily enough, though, and made out two figures asleep on the couch to her right, and another sitting on the edge of the hearth to her left.

"You must be Jeremy," she said.

He was a beautiful boy. Sixteen, she guessed, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Mouth like a soft-clay sculpture. He wore bloodstained clothing, jeans and a shirt, and there was more blood matted at his temple and dried into the corner of his lips. It had crusted on his eyelashes.

He glanced at her. "You must be Slate."

"It's Shale."

She held out her hand. He shook it slowly, letting her feel the broken bones under his skin.

He hadn't restored his image, obviously. Shale herself had never looked better, her light-brown hair pulled up in a loose bun. She'd chosen a green and white sweater with simple blue pants, and she wore pearls in her ears. It was nice to come here and feel clean, well-cared for. She wanted to offer Jeremy that.

"How did you end up here?" she asked, sitting down beside her.

He nodded toward the couch. "That's my soulmate over there."

Shale's gaze followed his and she felt her magically rebuilt heart stop beating a moment. Oh, she had forgotten in all this why she was the one here.

She could barely see Marty. He was buried mostly under blankets, but it was obvious enough that he and the girl were curled together.

Her gut panged, but she felt a little flicker of satisfaction.

So you survived, Marty. Good for you.

"They aren't sleeping together," Jeremy interrupted. "If that's what you're thinking. She's here as his therapist. Which I don't get, because Cafi is one of the most selfish people on the earth. I was trying to talk to her, tell her to leave him alone, but he threw me out."

"Out of where?"

"Her head. You know, the dreams."

Shale looked slowly around the room. It was comfortable, homey. If I had lived, she thought, it would have been here with him. We would have been insanely happy.

"He's more powerful than I am," Jeremy continued. "I didn't expect that."

"He's a witch," Shale told him.

"I know. Circle Chimera. One of these bohemien Night World people."

Shale laughed, and he glanced at her.

"That was funny," she said.

He cracked a smile. "The guy was your soulmate?"

"Still is. I'm just not around to enjoy it."

"You know he's mental, right?"

"Mental?"

"Yeah, he went crazy. That's why Cafi's here."

The smile melted off her face. Marty hadn't held on, hadn't made it without her.

Shit, she thought, what did I do?

"She'll try to fix him, don't worry about it. She fixes everybody, that's what she does now. She just goes around bossing people into feeling how she thinks they should."

Shale stood up and walked to the edge of the couch. Jeremy followed her after a moment.

Cafi was light-haired, and her skin was almost as pale as Marty's. Neither one of them had seen much sun in the past year, and their faces were mirrors displaying dark circles and lines of tension.

"She doesn't look very happy," Shale remarked softly.

"Neither one of them is happy. Neither one of them knows how to deal with loss."

Her gaze lingered on his filthied clothing. "And you do?"

"Better than she does."

"Then why are you still wearing that?"

"I don't have any other clothes to put on."

Hmm, he really had been lost quickly. Hadn't anyone explained anything to him?

"You can do it with your mind," Shale told him.

He stared at her blankly.

"Just think yourself into other clothes, and you're wearing them." She ran a hand over her shirt. "I got shot in the chest, you don't think I died looking this tidy, do you?"

Jeremy still didn't respond. She could tell that he heard her because his eyes moved as if following her, but he made no reply. She glanced at Marty, and then back, and he was dressed in costume, startling her.

"Sometimes I wear this," he said, and pushed the rat mask off his face.

Cafi came slowly awake in Marty's arms. It wasn't at all a bad way to wake up, his shoulder was a nice pillow, but she found her right had gripping Marty's neck lightly, the same way she used to hold Jeremy while they slept.

Marty was talking in his sleep. "Where?..." he muttered, and then, "bird seed."

Cafi smiled. At least this time it was in English.

"Jumprope," he added, and she chuckled and closed her eyes again. "Home," he whispered.

Shale leaned back against the hearth. Jeremy was on the floor a few feet away, apparently sleeping. Sleep didn't sound bad to Shale at that moment either, although it hadn't occured to her that she would need it in this form.

Or maybe she just really wanted to kick Cafi off the couch and take her place next to Marty.

She smiled mistily to herself. Half this battle was going to be avoiding leaping into Marty's arms.

She stood up--still attached to habital human motions--and turned to face the mantle. She wanted to know how much physical presence she had.

Not much, apparently. Her hand went right through a group photograph of the Chimera, and then through a clock. Shale gritted her teeth, concentrating, and she was able to push the long hand five minutes forward. It wasn't easy, but she thought that with practice it would become less difficult.

"They sleep like dogs," Jeremy said. "Curled up together."

Shale glanced at him. "You realize that you don't have any claim to her now, right?"

His eyes flashed and he was on his feet instantly, using powers of the afterlife he probably didn't even realize he had. He had changed out of his rat costume and was wearing his filthy death-suit again. "She's my soulmate," he hissed.

Unperturbed, Shale said, "That sort of thing only counts when you're alive. The way I see it, she gets the rest of this life to do as she pleases."

"Even if it's with him?" Jeremy demanded, gesturing.

Shale forced a smile. "If she can make him happy while I can't, more power to her. Besides, I get him in the next life."

"If there's another life after this one, why haven't I been born again yet?"

"You've got to wait for Cafi. You want to bump into each other again, right?"

Jeremy considered. "Then why don't I just kill Cafi?"

Shale stared at him, feeling a nugget of shocked horror rise up in her throat. It strangled her. "What are you talking about?" she asked hollowly.

He shrugged. "If I just kill Cafi, then we can hurry this process up. We'll be reborn together in no time."

She shook her head, still reeling. No wonder she had been sent; the boy was a fucking lunatic.

"You can't kill her," she said.

"Sure I can. If Cafi knew about this, I'm sure she'd kill herself."

"Jeremy." Saying his name seemed to bring his focus back to her. She took a step forward. "Cafi does know. She's with Circle Daybreak, she knows all about the soulmate principal and what happens. She knows that when she dies you'll be reborn, and not before."

"She doesn't know," he insisted. His eyes narrowed. "Who told you all this about me and Cafi?"

It was Shale's turn not to answer. She merely turned her face back to the fireplace.

"She doesn't know," Jeremy repeated, and she watched him walk to the couch and touch his fingers to Cafi's forehead.

"What are you doing?"

Cafi frowned in her sleep. Jeremy dipped his hand smoothly into her head and then out again. His eyes were closed tightly.

"Jeremy," Shale said again, "what are you doing?"

His fingers strayed to her wrist, and he concentrated to draw it above her head. First the left, then the right.

"Don't," Cafi moaned, but appeared helpless to stop him.

"Be quiet," Jeremy whispered. Shale didn't know if Cafi could hear him or not, but she began crying quietly.

Wake up, Marty, Shale thought. Stop him.

Marty didn't stir, but Cafi started moving restlessly on the couch, her hands wrapped together as if bound.

"It's okay," Jeremy told her. "See? I'm here, I love you."

Shale watched him continue to run his hands through his soulmate's body, while she trembled and whimpered. What was he doing? He'd said something earlier about her dreams, it was possible that he was influencing them.

"Jeremy, stop whatever you're doing," she said.

He ignored her.

"I'm serious. She's getting upset, you're hurting her."

Jeremy pushed Cafi's legs apart and stood between them. Shale sat up, startled as she realized what was going on. What was this, some kind of psychic rape?

"Marty!" she shouted. "Marty, wake up!"

He didn't stir, although he was frowning now as well. Cafi began begging more loudly for Jeremy stop.

Shale saw him reach for the rusted zipper of his filthy pants, and transported herself across the room with a thought. Sending strength to her hands, she brought one over Marty's mouth and used the other to pinch his nose shut.

Marty's eyes flicked open when he stopped breathing. He jerked his head back but a long second passed before his airways cleared, and his heart thudded with fear the whole time.

He attention switched abruptly as he saw Cafi on the couch beside him. She was sobbing as if strangled herself, and he was immediately crushed by the overwhelming sense of a hot, furious presence standing above them.

He spoke the words before he knew what he was doing. "In this fateful hour, I call upon Heaven with all it's power."

He shook Cafi's shoulders and reached to draw her arms down. One of her legs was extended sideways over the edge of the couch, but it hung in the air in a position Marty would have found incredibly hard to hold for more than a few seconds. In fact, it almost appeared suspended by an invisible rope.

"And the sun with its brightness, and the moon with its whiteness."

The presence grew weaker, its grip on Cafi lessened, but at the same time it burned hotter against Marty's skin.

"And the fire with all the strength it hath, and the lightening with its rapid wrath."

Her legs remained bound, but Cafi's torso twisted so that she could grab Marty's shoulders with both hands.

"And the winds with their swif-"

He didn't even have to finish the incantation and whatever cloud of energy was floating above them dispersed. Cafi rolled right off the couch, knocking her elbow on the coffee table, and Marty reached over to throw the light switch.

The living room was empty.

"God dammit!" Cafi screamed. Her fist hit the table so hard Marty thought the marble top would crack.

Her face turned up to his, sticky with fresh tears, stained with misery. "Why is this happening?" she cried. "What the hell is going on?"

He reached out and helped her back onto the couch, handed her a box of Kleenex. "It was just a nightmare," he said.

"Then why did you have to use magic to send it away?" she demanded. "You don't send nightmares away with magic."

She stood up and started pacing across the room, rubbing her wrists. Marty could see raw red rug-burns stretching all the way across the backs of her hands, and couldn't help wondering if she was right. Psychologists said it was possible to induce changes in the body with thought, but he'd seen her leg hang there in the air as if lifted, and he wasn't able to rule out other-worldly assistence with a clear conscience.

"I can do all sorts of things with magic," Marty told her. "You can fight things with physical origins using magic, it works fine because they're all interconnected."

She glanced at him, her pacing stilted. "Does it work the other way around?"

"How do you mean?"

"Can you fight magic with physical action?"

He thought a moment. "I guess it's possible. I've never tried it."

"Do you have any guns?"

He shook his head, even then remembing the bulky magnum he had glimpsed once among Shale's things. He didn't want to lie to Cafi, but he didn't think it would be a good idea to bring semi-automatic weapons into the situation now.

"I don't think we should go that route," he said.

"Oh, so I'm just supposed to sit down while this thing tears me up inside? This isn't natural, I've haven't had these nightmares since....I don't know. They stopped about six months after Jeremy died."

Marty didn't reply, he couldn't think of anything that might make her feel better. He picked up the pencil off the coffee table and twirled it dily between his fingers.

Cafi watched him. "How can you be so calm? Doesn't it bother you that some malignant energy is flying around your house?"

He shrugged gently, trying to help her understand with seeming to dismiss her fears. "I've grown up with magic. It's always been here, sometimes it's malevolent."

"Then you know how to get rid of it."

Marty sighed inwardly. He liked Cafi, but she didn't know a goddamn thing about magic.

"Why are you giving me that look?" she asked.

"If you're going to use magic," he told her, "there are some things I need to teach you."

She didn't argue with him. "We'll start tomorrow."

Cafi woke up in the morning tangled with Marty. They were on their sides, flopped over in the night, drowning in blankets, sunlight and shadows. Marty was talking in his sleep, in a drifty, half aduible voice.

She closed her eyes and lay her forehead against his neck. "Am o rezervare," he whispered, and it sounded like, "I am resurected."

Was that what he dreamt? That she had come and resurected him? Was it even possible to resurect someone?

She didn't know how she'd ended up sleeping on the couch with him again. It seemed like last night had gone on for days, beginning and ending over again with each awakening.

She climbed out of his grip, laying the blankets carefully around him, and wandered into the kitchen. She needed a few minutes alone, and the silent warmth of the kitchen was comforting.

God, no one had ever woken her up from a nightmare before. It was the first time the rats had been thwarted. Maybe this was just her clinging to him because he'd been her savior, twice now from the dead animals.

She felt so fragile. She hadn't felt like this in a long time, not since she latched on to the self-help movement and began clinging to the support beams of modern-day psychology. She was an emotional malestrom, and she didn't want to talk to Marty this way. She was supposed to be helping him.

Which made what had happened the night before unacceptable. She couldn't lean on him. She had to bone up. Where was the Cafi Dana who had spent nine hours crammed in the mud and darkness under the foundation of Cress Horn's house, trying to talk him out of impaling himself on the ugly end of a broomstick?

Cress had killed himself a few weeks ago. She didn't want to think about it. If Marty tired anything similar, she would completely lose control.

Maybe she had already. Her arms were tingling with nervous energy and she had licked her lips raw.

And she used to feel so competent.

Her legal pad was sitting on the kitchen table, and beside it one of those nifty new gel-ink pens. She could have sworn she'd left it in the guest house, but maybe not. Maybe she had gone and gotten it the night before, so that she could take notes while she talked to Marty. She had taken notes, hadn't she?

Either way, the pad was here.

She climbed into a chair, comfortable in this kitchen, comfortable in this Nebraska farm house with its fire places and wooden walls. She was developing a fondness for its antiquity, and the strange hominess that everyone secretly longed for.

Dear Marty, she wrote. I'm scared for both of us. You because you're crazy, me because I'm afraid that somehow in the process of trying to help you, I'll destroy myself. That sounds absurd, I know, and I'm never supposed to call anyone crazy, but let's be honest here. It's not such a bad word. It just means you've lost your grip on reality.

She wrote for more than an hour, admitting things she hadn't even realized she was feeling. Admiration, jealousy, cringing. In the end she found nothing, just words. Her emotions weren't ordered enough to really mean anything, to create in their own existence a manipulatable problem with an obtainable solution.

It would crystalize with time, and she would be able to understand. Patience, she reminded herself. She smiled. You will be resurected.

She went upstairs to take a shower, and when she returned, Marty was already awake and hunched over his scores. She called his name hesitantly and he looked up, smiling and saying, "Don't worry, I'm lucid today."

"That's good."

Cafi sat down on the couch, toweling at her hair. "What are you working on?"

"I just finished act three."

"How many acts are there?"

"Four. You look awfully tired, did you sleep okay?"

She lifted an eyebrow. "Yeah, I think so."

"Where did those welts on your ankles come from?"

Cafi turned her face sharply away and forced herself to answer in a steady voice. "It was from the dream. I thought I was being tied up, so my skin swelled. It'll go away in a day or two."

Marty continued to watch her. "Did you have those dreams often?"

"They started about two weeks after Jeremy died, and stopped a few months later. I haven't had anything similar since then. But...."

"Go on."

She knew she shouldn't be saying this, that it was another infringement, but the words just came out. "Last night it was different. I mean, the rats were still there, and they wanted the same thing, but....I got the weird feeling that the head rat was wearing a costume."

Marty didn't laugh. "What was he dressed as?"

"No, I mean the rat was only someone wearing a costume. It wasn't a rat at all."

"What do you think it means?"

She shrugged. "What did the dream mean to begin with? I get gang banged by a bunch of man-sized living-dead rats. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense."

Now she was getting defensive, and she hated hearing that. It was...rampant. "Maybe we could talk about something else," she suggested.

"Sure. I like what you did with the snowman."

"The snowman?"

"Oh, is it a woman? Sorry. It's cute, either way."

"I didn't make a snowman," Cafi said.

Marty frowned, standing up. "You can see it from here," he told her, gesturing that she come to the window.

Standing beside him, she peered through the glass. In front of the house stood a snow man. It was mostly indistinct, just lumps packed into clothing and formed to the outline of a man, but Cafi recognized it. The frame, the way the snowman seemed to rest his weight on one leg.

It was like seeing a portrait of a ghost.

She flew past Marty, letting the towel drop to the floor, and then scrambling at the front door. Her hands beat at the locks, too frenzied to consider their operation, until they opened, and she dove into the snow, barely feeling the freeze on her care feet.

"Cafi?" Marty asked, and then more urgently. "Cafi!"

The porch steps were obscured by the snow, and she fell two feet onto her hands and knees. Now the freeze came, and the sharp pain of her calf scraping against the step corner. Cafi almost turned back, but her eyes caught the tilt of the snowman's head and she was dashing forward again, kicking up clouds of dusty snow behind herself.

The head was non-descript, lacking eyes or ears or a mouth, but she recognized the lines of the jaw, the way it attched to the neck. A thousand little details she had never accounted for when Jeremy had been alive. Her hand reached out to follow the line of his hips beneath the jeans, and she didn't realize how filthy they were until her fingers came away dark with soot.

She made a little unsure sound, and then Marty was there. "What are you doing?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

Without waiting for an answer, he was lifting one of her feet and then the other and slipping them into shoes far too big for her. The weight of a thick coat came down on her shoulders and his hands tried to nudge hers into gloves.

"It's Jeremy," she said. "It's Jeremy wearing his clothes..."

The sweatshirt was charred black in front. The right shoulder was held together only by melted strands of plastic thread, a frozen, stiff web in front of the snow. The lower legs of the jeans were burned completely away, but the hips had survived with a heavy dusting of soot.

Cafi's hand was red. She stepped around to see the back of the snowman, stumbling in the over-sized shoes, and saw the brown marks. Compared to the black ashes, it was obviously too dark a brown to be dirt. No, not dirt. Blood.

And not just a little blood, a lot. The sort of loss a person could die from, if they didn't burn to death first.

She stepped back, the shock being replaced by absolute horror. "It's the clothes he was wearing when he died," she said. Her hand reached out and clutched Marty's. "They said the engine caught on fire, that his face burned, but the driver's seat broke inside and one of the metal prongs went into his back. Look at it, Marty, there's the blood and the ashes."

Even as she watched, the back of the sweatshirt began to glisten, and Cafi realized slowly that fresh blood was welling up beneath the cloth. "Oh christ," she gasped.

"Come on," Marty said, tugging her arm. "Let's go back to the house."

"Do you see?" she cried. "Don't you see the blood?"

He took a firm grip around her waist with one arm. "I see it. Come on."

"He's bleeding!"

Marty grabbed her chin in one hand and turned it until she looked at him, firm but gentle. "He's a snowman. Snowmen don't bleed. Come inside."

She didn't know what else to do. She let him lead her back into the house, where he discovered that there was blood soaking through her own jeans where she'd fallen off the porch.

She sat on the kitchen counter, gripping the edge until her fingers hurt, while Marty pulled out a first aid kit and rolled up her pant leg.

"It was bleeding, Marty. I saw it."

"I know. I saw it, too."

"Then why didn't you do something?"

He dabbed at the blood with a cloth. "That's the sort of magic that only grows stronger if you encourage it."

"How did it get there? And the clothes...."

His face was dark, and she got the feeling he understood more than he addmited to.

"Marty? What's going on?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do." She raked through her hair and Marty stung her cuts with anticeptic. He didn't answer and she felt her internal temperature beginning to rise. "What is going on here? Jeremy's clothes were thrown out three years ago, he's been dead for three years and now there's a snowman of him in the front yard? Did you do it, Marty? Did you just pluck the thought out of my head?"

"No." He looked up at her and firmly held onto her ankle. "No, Cafi, I'm not responsible for that. And I couldn't have taken the thought from your mind because you don't know exactly what he was wearing. You think it was his gray sweatshirt, but you're not sure."

"You read my mind?" she asked weakly.

"I can't help it, you're broadcasting. Cafi." He glanced away, thinking, and then went on, "There may be more here going on that I first realized."

"Like what?"

His words came slowly. "Was Jeremy ever involved in the occult? Not the Night World, but some other lineage of magic?"

Memories like stinging slaps came into Cafi's mind, and she forced them away. "He dabbled," she admitted. "But he never got anywhere."

"Was he awake when he died?"

She twisted to look at him.

"I know it's a horrible question, but it could be important."

Swallowing, she said, "The police told me he was probably awake. His eyes were open."

She climbed down from the counter, shivering. Her feet were on fire. "Why is this happening?" she whispered, and Marty's arm closed around her from behind.

"Stay with me a minute, okay? I know panic is tempting, but just hold on a little longer."

He led her through the living room and into his own bedroom, which didn't have a window that looked out on the snowman. Cafi sat down on his bed, shivering, and he lifted the blankets to wrap around her. She felt as if the ceiling were coming down in an airtight room, and it was going to compress the living hell out of her any second.

"I'll be right back," Marty said.

"Wait, where are you going?"

"I'm going to destroy that thing."

"Are you sure? What if..."

He shook his head. "It's evil, Cafi. Stay here, I'll come back in a few minutes."

He left through the kitchen, but Cafi couldn't sit still. She drew the blankets around her shoulders and walked into the living room to peer out from behind the curtains.

Marty walked around the side of the house carrying a square, red jug made of industrial plastic. Without hesitating, he peeled the cap off the nossle and poured the contents over the snowman's head. Amber rivers turned the figure's limbs to dirty slush, melting and running.

When he ran out of gasoline, Marty stepped back and removed a lighter from his pocket. Cafi almost cried out, terrified he was going to accidently blow himself up, but he expertly lit the snowman on fire and leapt away as it flared like the Olympic flame.

He started to walk back toward the garage and then stopped abruptly. Cafi saw him shiver, as if something had just gone through him, and he dropped the gas jug into the snow. His steps were different when he resumed his trek, this time in the direction of the front door. They were shorter, less sure, bumbling.

She knew what it meant before he had even come inside. "Buna dimineata, domnule O'Bach," Cafi greeted him, throwing open the door. He glanced up, not meeting her eyes but coming close, and nodded vaguely, then brushed past her.

She followed him into the living room and saw him reach for his scores again. She was about to scramble for the Romanian dictionary, to attempt suggesting that he not write because of his finger, when she noticed that he had simply transfered the pencil to his left hand.

She had memorized the greeting that morning, but that was as far as her language training went. Frustrated, she sat down on the couch to watch him a while, then remembered what she had heard him murmur this morning in his sleep.

"Martule," she called, and was rewarded with a slight inclination of his head in her direction. "Am o rezervare."

He shook his head. "Nu," was all he said.

Marty was turning away from the flaming snowman when he saw Cafi standing at the window. Damn, he hadn't meant for her to see this.

He'd woken up twice after the nightmare the night before, both times finding Cafi curled up in his arms like a lost child. When she had come to him after Shale's death she had seemed so strong, so directed and sure of her path. Now he was watching that crumble in her. During the day she was skittish, and he could see the clouds in her face. At night she had nightmares and cried in her sleep.

He had found himself kissing the tears off her cheeks. He thought that maybe he shouldn't have done that.

She blinked slowly and drew the curtain back over the window. Marty waited a moment, then walked in the direction of the garage.

When he reentered the house, he found her sitting on his bed, wrapped tightly in his blankets. It was uncomfortably intimate; he had been booted from his personal space and had no where else to run. She was turning the pages of a large, hard-cover book slowly, her eyes racing over each page so quickly that he knew she wasn't doing more than skimming it.

"It's gone," Marty told her.

She shook her head, not looking up. "It's not gone," she said in a low, flat voice.

He pressed his lips together and leaned against the doorframe. It wasn't gone. That feeling that had been in the air during Cafi's nightmare the night before was still present, stronger even. And now it was manifesting on a physical level.

Marty turned away, walking back into the living room. He mechanically reached for Boris Godunov and put it in the cd player, relieved to hear the pained opening as he sat down on the couch. Beautiful music, miserable music. He didn't know what do say to her.

He sat for a while on the couch with his eyes closed, just letting the molten lava Russian flow over him. He drifted and found a little rest in it, and eventually Cafi came and sat down beside him. She put her hand on the back of his neck and leaned close so that she could whisper under the music, "Let's get out of here for a while."

Marty opened his eyes. "Where would be go?"

"Lincon must have a mall, right? We'll go shopping."

He smiled. "Shopping?"

"My mother was sure I'd miss my connection in Huston. She gave me a Visa Platnium to get a hotel room." Her blue eyes--still pained--twinkled a little. "It's a whole month before she'll see the bill. Might as well do some damage."

Marty chuckled. "All right, but not too much damage."

Marty didn't know square one about shopping. He consulted the mall map at least three times and still wasn't sure where he wanted to go, the crowds seemed to startle him, and he kept looking up at the high ceilings as if they made him nervous.

Cafi liked the mall. The ceilings only made her feel free, and despite being crowded and too warm, the place reminded her of an ancient marketplace. Too public to be carrying any magical dangers.

The food court was almost deserted as they sat down to a late lunch of egg-noodle salad and fu-wak. Dying wreathes of holly hung from shop doorways, most of the Christmas lights had burned out, and somebody had stuffed the display Santa Clause's mouth with cigarette butts. He had one plastic hand down the shorts of an elf's pants.

"This is better," Cafi said.

Marty nodded. "I feel like I'm cheating."

"Cheating?"

"Running away."

"Sometimes there are things worth running from."

He considered her thoughtfully, and Cafi felt suddenly stupid. "I agree with that," he said finally, "but...I also believe in lessons. That sometimes wisdom comes from difficult lessons, and that you can't run away from those. You have to go full circle with them."

"And being haunted by your dead soulmate counts?"

Cafi dropped her fork and Marty looked up sharply.

"I didn't mean to say that," she told him.

He ignored her. "Is that what you think?"

She swallowed. "I dreamed of Shale last night. I don't know what that means."

"You can't think it's Shale."

"I don't know what to think. I never even met her. I don't know what she looks like, or how she talks, or much of anything. But in the dream I knew without question that it was her, and she was..."

"Go on."

Cafi drank out of the paper cup holding her soda. "She was protecting you from me."

"No," he said. "Don't think like that."

"I'm not helping you any here, Marty. If anything, I seem to be making you worse."

"Making me worse? How do you judge that? You've been here three days."

"And things are already getting weird. We've got ten days left before we leave for New York, who knows what could happen in that time."

"You're not my therapist, Cafi."

"I'm not?" She was starting to get angry. "Then what the hell am I doing here?"

He shook his head. "You're supporting me."

"No more than you're supporting me."

"Why can't we do both?"

"Because I'm the one with years experience in soulmate-survival counsciling, and you're the one in mourning."

His milky green eyes narrowed on her. "And you're not still mourning?"

She glared at him, raging inside. "I'm not the one who's running, Marty. I've faced my damn demons."

"Once," he agreed. "Don't be angry, hear me out." He leaned across the table and put his hand over hers. "You dealt with it when Jeremy died. You've put it behind you, you're over it. But you aren't moving forward."

"How would you know?" she snapped.

"You haven't mentioned a single friend you have who isn't in your support group. I haven't heard you talk about dating at all since Jeremy-"

"You think I should be dating?" she exploded, standing up. "You don't get to make these choices for me, you don't even get to presume to know what you're talking about. These are my issues. I'm the one who will decide how to handle them."

He grabbed onto her purse as she turned to storm away, and his face was still serene. "Don't walk away," he said.

"You're being abusive," she replied, and his eyes widened.

"I am?"

"Well..." She shrugged. "You're hurting me."

"I didn't mean to hurt you."

She sat down again. "I thought we came here to forget all this stuff for a while."

"We did." She could see regret in his face, but it didn't make the tidalwave inside any gentler. She needed to hold onto the idea that she was in charge if she was going to make it. She needed to believe that she was still strong.

"Why don't we open our fortunes?" he suggested, holding out a cookie.

Cafi took it reluctantly and cracked the pastry open. Her throat went dry as she stared at the slip of paper inside.

"What's wrong?" Marty asked.

"It's blank," she said.

Cafi lay on the couch and dozed as Marty continued to write. She'd watched him fill line after line, never with any hesitation or even thought. He just knew what to put down.

She wondered if that spoke about how him mind was operating. Maybe he didn't hesitate because his inner critic had been demolished. Maybe she was watching pure subconscious made art. Interesting idea.

Her vision blurred as she struggled not to fall asleep. "Marty," she said vaguely, more to herself than to him, "I'd really appreciate it if you'd snap out around now."

Even though she'd anticipated no reaction, seeing his eyes never flicker toward her was still hurtful. With a sigh, she got up and went into his bedroom. She'd seen him put the Romanian-English dictionary away earlier, but now as she reached for it, she saw a number of other books on the shelf above the desk. Namely, Romanian Coversation Guide.

It was an entire book of helpful phrases, complete with pronunciations. Cafi settled on the couch and began flipping through, looking for something that might get him talking. Unfortunately, the book had been intended for those wishing to engage in polite conversation, and didn't contain anything resembling, "Wake the hell up!"

She finally got down on the floor beside him and, touching his shoulder hesitantly, said, "Pic de somn."

His head tilted in her direction again, aknowdeging her without looking at her. "Ma duc sa ma culc," she added.

He nodded slightly, and she started to rise. Suddenly his hand clapped down on her, pressing it tightly against the wide weave of her sweater. "Somn usor," he whispered.

Cafi rocked back on her heels, and the warmth of Marty's hand vanished from hers. Without break, he returned to his work, drawing endless tiny notes on the paper.

After a stunned moment, if occured to Cafi to glance down at the book in her hand. Under the same section of phrases where she had found the two she had used, "In the Evening," was somn usor. It meant simply, "Sleep well."

The evening passed uneventfully. After dropping a bag of groceries off in the kitchen, Marty found Cafi asleep on his bed and made himself a place on the couch. His CD player dooled out gentle piano solos, and he left the light on in his room so that he could see Cafi. If she started dreaming, he wanted to wake up.

They had cheered up after lunch, and Cafi had talked him into seeing a truly silly movie about a girl who gets pregnant and discovers that she's an alien. Then they went to the most expensive store around and claimed they were going to homecoming and needed to be fully outfitted. Naturally, the only thing Cafi bought was a sweater on sale.

The phone rang suddenly. He scrambled out of the blankets to grab the receiver on the end table and lift it to his face. "Hello?"

Dead air rang in his ears. "Hello?" he asked again.

"Run," someone on the other end whispered.

"Who is this?" Marty asked softly, without anger. His right ear was hidden behind plastic, and he felt the hot air brush the left side of his face in one furious word.

"Die."

Marty sat up, all senses going out. Something perched above him, as if sitting on the back of the couch. Something else in office upstairs, where the other phone line ran. Malice. Grime.

"Who are you and what do you want?" he said firmly. "This is my territory, and all beings of negativity are unwelcome here."

As stupid as it sounded, often running from ghosts wasn't such a bad idea. Marty climbed slowly off the couch, always keeping his eyes on it even though there was nothing to see. He could feel it, like a furnace, spewing rage at it. Whatever was there, it was pissed.

He had dropped the phone on the couch, and now saw it bounce against the couch cushion as if something had just come down beside it. A fist maybe, or a foot. Marty could feel the net of energy moving closer to him, and his left hand closed around the bit of bone that hung from a chain at his neck.

"Stop," he said. "You may come no closer."

He closed his eyes, showing no fear, and found the sphere of his aura around him. His right hand moved swiftly, and the loop expanded and thicked, rustling like tissue paper as it grew. In his mind's eyes he saw bursts of red color blossom and swell, soaking all around him.

The energy stopped, unable to get any closer. Marty backed up until he was standing in the doorway of his bedroom. Now he became aware of a second being in his house again, the one upstairs that was moving down so quickly. The one that had told him to run.

"Name yourself," he directed.

"Marty?" Cafi asked from behind him, and he jumped, startled out of a trance halfway between the real world and one more transient.

That was all this energy needed, a moment's weakness. It leapt on him, and Marty felt his aura cave around him like a wet blanket tossed over his head. He fell to his knees, teeth clenched, hands fisted painfully, trying to build another protective space, this one under the heavy weight of a foe.

Hands like the touch of solidified air closed around his throat, and beneath the rushing in his ears, he heard Cafi speak incoharently.

His mind scrambled for a weapon, something that would give him the advantage. The second being, the one that had come running down the stairs, came closer. Tendrils of it reached out and closed on the hands that held his neck. Marty couldn't breathe, his hands batted at intangible nothing in the air, and he felt a heel plant itself against his thigh. It pushed hard against him, straining to drag the malignant energy off.

From behind, Cafi was trying to do the himlick-maneuver. Marty could feel the four of them in close contact at his neck, himself, Cafi, this humanized and furious vapor, and-

His eyes focused on the fourth, on the being trying to save his life. He could see the beginnings of a crack in the air, exploding with light. Mist crept out, sizzling as it came in contact with this world, forming another set of hands, arms, slender shoulders and a wisp of light brown hair.

Then the split began to grow at a shocking rate, just pulling down to the floor like a zipper given a harsh tug. Cafi screamed, falling back as something white reached out and smacked her head. The hands vanished from Marty's neck, in between gasping he was able to see a bloodied, twisted leg forcing its way through the tear in the center of the room.

"Don't!" cried a voice on the other side, and Marty froze to hear it. Couldn't be, couldn't be....

Cafi knocked him over as she lunged forward with a pair of scissors and sent them plunging into the torn blue jeans that stuck out of the split that reminded Marty so much of a tent flap. The sharp ends dug into fabric, ripped through and smashed flesh until it tore and a wound's ragged lips burst out in all directions. Blood and slimy gray mucus spewed out as if under high pressure, but Cafi just dug the tool deeper.

Furious screaming whirlwinded into the room, and with it a gust of power strong enough to send Marty and Cafi both flailing on their backs. Again, he heard that voice from months ago, just slightly soft-spoken, saying, "It's over, Jeremy."

With a quick bend in the fabric of the room, like a piece of paper folded and then smoothed, the crack vanished, and all sense of danger with it.

Marty let his head smack back against the floorboards, panting. Dear Goddess, that hadn't been Shale's voice, had it? That hadn't been her heel digging into him while she tried to drag Jeremy off of him?

Cafi got up on one elbow. Breathing heavily, she said, "Ce mai faceti?"

Marty blinked at her. Had she just said, "How are you?" in Romanian?

"What?" he asked.

"Oh, thank god," she muttered, and let her forehead fall against his chest. "The last thing I need is to try to make you speak English right now."

They lay still for a few minutes, both of them exhausted, and then Cafi sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. "That was Jeremy," she said. "I'm sure it was him."

Marty leaned against the side of the bed, rubbing his neck. "It was Jeremy," he agreed. And Shale might have been with him.

There were tears in Cafi's eyes that she was trying hard not to let him see. He gave her a weak smile and reached for her hand.

"It's all right," he told her. "We'll figure this out."

"Maybe I should leave," she replied.

"What? Why?"

She swallowed. "Because I don't need you to fight my battles for me."

"Somebody's got to do it."

"Not you. You have more important stuff to think about, like not hallucinating any more. If Jeremy's ghost is pissed at me, I'll take care of it."

She stood up, and Marty followed. He recognized the look on her face, absolute guilt, and knew that if she faced Jeremy alone again, she would feel too disgusted with herself to fight back.

"What is it he wants with you?" Marty asked. "Why would be come back now, of all times?"

She stared at him for a long time. The dampness in her blue eyes made them appear luminous, and he saw her hands trembling until she wound them together. Finally she sighed, and her expression hardened with hints of resentment. "You figure it out, Marty," she said, and walked past him into the living room.

He rubbed his still-sore neck. What did that mean? he wondered, walking after her.

She was sitting on the couch in the living room, so he sat down next to her. "You're really going?" he asked.

"I just realized that I can't leave you here alone."

"Why not?"

"You might hurt yourself."

She looked absolutely miserible, and Marty didn't know what to tell her. He didn't want her to leave, but he didn't want to force her to stay here.

"Why did you say that earlier?" he asked instead.

She glanced at him, snapping out of her thoughts. "Say what?"

"Ce mai faceti?" he repeated.

"Oh, you don't remember, do you? You went into one of your trances this morning, after you torched the snowman. When I went to bed, you were still working on your opera."

Marty frowned. "But..." he began, and then rose and went into the kitchen. On the table, just where he had left them, were two bags. One held groceries, and the other held the sweater Cafi had pruchased at incredible discount.

"Then where did this come from?" he asked, walking back into the living room with the sweater in one hand. "I remember us going shopping today and buying this. Did you get it while I was in trance?"

Cafi stood up quickly. "I didn't leave the house. I barely left the living room. This..." She examined the sweater. "Are you sure you didn't have it already?"

He held out a slip of yellow paper. "Isn't that your signiture on the reciept?"

She stared, dumbfounded. "And it's my credit card number. How the hell is that possible? I was here all day, and so were you."

Marty went back into the kitchen and found his stack of scores. "Well," he concluded, "somebody's been working on this."

"Then which was one us was hallucinating? You or me?"

"Shopping and writing that happens in hallucinations doesn't leave proof like this. All I can figure is that maybe they both happened."

"At the same time?" She shook her head. "I've accepted that the Night World is real, Marty, but Star Trek is pushing my buttons."

"How else do you explain it? Both todays happened, the one you remember and I one I remember. We have proof of both."

She sat down at the kitchen table and put her chin on one hand. "Do you realize," she asked darkly, "how powerful Jeremy must actually be to have done something like this? He's twising reality and the time line."

Marty nodded. "All the more reason why you can't fight him alone." He leaned across the table toward her. "And no, Cafi," he added, "you don't owe him that because he was your soulmate. You don't owe him anything."

Except for a nightlight over the stove and the gray snowlight held back by the lace curtains, the room was dark. "I know," Cafi said softly. "But sometimes it seems to cruel to him t-"

"No," Marty whispered. "It's just as cruel to you."

"He must be so unhappy, being dead and knowing that I'm here and if he just tried he could get to me-"

"No, no. That's not how it works. He doesn't have any rights to you."

"Why is he my soulmate if we aren't meant to be together?"

"Meant? Divinity is far beyond my grasp and yours. Why did I only get twenty-four hours with Shale? What's the meaning of that? If anybody's soulmate should be coming back for more time, it should be mine, not yours."

He stopped, realizing how loud his voice had grown. Cafi was looking at him with an expression of pure surprise; it was the first time she had seen him at all angry.

"You're right," she said slowly. "Maybe meant doesn't have anything to do with it. Jeremy....he was pretty possessive of me, pretty obsessive. He's probably just trying to latch onto me."

Marty nodded. "And who ya gonna call when you have a ghost?"

She smiled slightly. "Ghostbusters?"

"Next best thing. Witches."

Shale sat on the window seat, her head tilted back against the warm glass, and watched Marty sit at the piano. He wore thick gray socks that made his toes look smooth and webbed below those funny cotton pants of his and a black sweatshirt. Downstairs, Shale could hear water running in the kitchen, Cafi doing the breakfast dishes. Jeremy stood a few feet from the window, arms crossed, eyes violently dark. Obviously he was still angry at Marty for thwarting last night's attempt at entrance into the walking world.

It hadn't occurred to Shale that that's what he had in mind until he'd reached out with one knife-edged nail and slashed the veil open. She hadn't realized he had so much power, or that she had so little. All her life she'd walked among humans, knowing that she could take or give life as she chose, but here she was far less trained or weaponed.

The morning was warmer today, but hazey clouds that hinted at rain flew across the Nebraska sky. Gusts of snow rose off the ground and fell in fresh blankets over the footprints made yesterday. This room in the attic appeared to be a haven for hobbyists, tables were covered in everything from model airplanes to the tools necessary for soddering stained-glass. As it ran the length of the house, Marty's grand piano didn't take up too much room.

Marty had slept on his bedroom floor, Cafi had taken the bed. They'd left a light on, and some soft Gregorian chanting. Shale had sat on the desk, manifesting her fingers over and over just enough to roll a pencil across the ink blotter and then back. She'd been trying to remember why she was stopping Jeremy from coming back to life if it meant she got a chance at being with Marty again.

It wasn't fair, that much was true. Twenty-four hours, and they had been lousy hours spent in pain and fear at that. If Marty was loosing his mental health because she was gone, and she could come back, what was to stop her?

It was a bad thought. Without pressing too far into recent memories, she understood intuitively that under no circumstances was she to regain her mortality. It was against the laws of nature, and to break one would mean sinning against Creation. She wasn't about to go there.

It was just so damn frustrating.

The water downstairs shut off, and Shale heard Cafi make her way slowly up the stairs. The girl leaned in the doorway for a moment, watching Marty write, before coming to sit down beside him on the bench.

"What are you working on?" she asked.

Marty looked up, startled, and smiled. "Just an old concerto I haven't touched in months."

"How can you be his soulmate?" Jeremy asked Shale. "He's so obviously gay."

Cafi's eyes lifted to the pages, and her hands crept onto the keys. Shale saw her back straighten habitually, as if she had been at that bench a thousand times before.

"Oh my god," Jeremy breathed.

"What are you doing?" Marty asked, noticing as well.

Cafi ignored him. Her left hand came down in a simple chord. The fingers on her right touched a few notes briefly, and then music began to pour out from the piano. No systemic creshendos now, just a rush that moved higher and higher in the space of the room. Shale felt dizzy for a moment and had to blink her non-existent eyes back into being.

Marty simply watched, his lips parted, until he had the sense to turn the page. Cafi didn't miss a beat, her hands moved in ever quicker strokes over the keyboard, her right foot finally found the petals and the sound was refined, restrained and let loose as she saw fit.

"That bitch," Jeremy said.

Cafi didn't just have talent, she had the kind of natural inclination that made children into prodigies. Even in the blitz of notes, each one came out sounding like a complete thought, a finished, polished, framed word with perfect accent. Her rhythm was flawless, her coloring Monet-quality.

She stopped abruptly, and her hands jumped into her lap as if she were embarrassed that she had ever indulged herself. "Is that all there is?" she asked.

Marty shook his head, mystified. "How long have you been playing the piano, Cafi?" he asked.

She shrugged, not wanting to make a big deal out of it. "I stopped playing almost four and a half years ago."

"Stopped?"

"Yeah." Another shrug. "It's a good piece, Marty. You should finish it."

He wasn't ready to let the subject go. "How long did you play before you stopped?"

Cafi had to think. "Eleven years. But I quit when I was about thirteen."

"Why?"

"Because you're a lazy, selfish little bitch," Jeremy replied.

Shale watched the girl's eyes run over Marty's face, obviously afraid of somehow exposing herself. You're a fool, Marty, she thought, if you can't see that this girl is in love with you.

"My parents wanted to send me to New York," Cafi was saying, "to one of those schools where all you do all day is practice. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to be a pianist for the rest of my life. So I quit."

She wouldn't look at him then. Either she's hiding something, Shale thought, or else she's flat out lying.

Nearby, Jeremy was scoffing. "You quit?" he cried. "I quit for you, you ungrateful little tramp. You didn't have the guts to tell your parents where to get off. I'm the reason you didn't get sent to New York."

"You couldn't find a middle ground?" Marty asked.

"There aren't middle grounds in situations like that," Cafi told him. "You either let them hang you, or you cut your own neck."

Jeremy, Shale noted, was shaking his head in disgust. "Lair," he muttered.

Cafi straightened again, this time self-consciously. "It really is a great piece, Marty."

"It didn't sound like that when I wrote it," he said.

"What do you mean?"

Marty wetted his lips, thinking. "You're one of those people, aren't you? The kind that can take a stupid piece of music and put so much heart into it that it sounds like a masterpiece. It's like you took that concerto and gave it a soul."

Now Cafi and Jeremy were both shaking their heads. "She's utterly talentless," Jeremy said. "She always has been."

"Can't say I agree with you there," Shale muttered, and he looked at her sharply.

"I'm nothing special," Cafi told Marty. "I can just sight-read better than most."

He laughed, Shale was both happy and anxious to see. He scoffed in her face and said, "I've never heard such self-deprecation. You have an absolute gift, I won't let you tell me otherwise."

Shale swallowed. He was holding one of her hands with his again; he did that often, and it was always a strain on her airways.

Cafi just turned her face down and shook her head. "That's not the way it is," she murmured.

"Don't I know it," Jeremy snapped.

Marty frowned, beginning to see something wrong. "Did somebody tell you that?"

"A lot of people told me that."

"Like the New York Times," Jeremy specified. "What was it they said, Caf, 'child-like'? Just another way of saying 'childish.'"

Now Marty touched her chin, turned her head so that she would look at him. "Did Jeremy tell you that?"

Shale's fingers closed around the seat cushion. "Among others," Cafi whispered.

Her eyes met with Marty's and the air in the room froze. "They were wrong," Marty said, his voice equally soft.

Shale forced herself to inhale and look away. When she looked back, their lips had met and Cafi had her arms wrapped around Marty's neck.

Shale's fingers manifested and tore into the seat cushion, drawing little ditches in the foam. A few feet away, Jeremy exploded into a formless burst of black energy that ricosetted across the room. He flew under the paino and hit the bench so hard it tossed Marty and Cafi in opposite directions and then hit the wall.

"You slut!" Jeremy shouted, pulling back into the form of the beautiful boy on the other side of the room. He collapsed immediately into a limp heap on the floor, exhausted but already trying to stand up again.

Even with this furious sense of betrayal in her chest, Shale was able to yell, "Jeremy, don't hurt her!"

Cafi herself scrambled off the floor without a word and ran into the hall. Marty rubbed his head, which had collided with a metal music stand and swore under his breath.

"Why not?" Jeremy demanded. "That little whore is cheating on me! And with your soulmate! You ought to be as angry as I am."

It took as much determination as Shale had to reply, "We're dead, Jeremy. They get to live their own lives."

Jeremy watched as Marty climbed unsteadily to his feet and stumbled toward the door. "You two deserve each other," he muttered. "You're both nuts."

Cafi wasn't crying when she reached the guesthouse, but she was close. She'd come here to try to put her life back together, get her thoughts in order, write that book that should have been on the shelves by now. Goddamn, what had she been thinking when she kissed him? Why hadn't she pulled away when he kissed her?

Two sided thing, she thought, nobody's fault. No, both our faults. Especially mine. Probably all my fault.

The front door opened. "Cafi?" she heard Marty call from the living room.

"Go away!" she shouted, throwing sweaters and socks randomly into an open suitcase.

He knocked politely on the open door. She wouldn't look at him, couldn't look at him when she knew it would cause that heat to rise up inside her.

"What are you doing?" he asked, angerless.

"Leaving. I should have gone last night."

"Why?"

She felt her eyes flash, and she couldn't help glaring at him. "Isn't it obvious yet?" she rapped out. "Jeremy is pissed off because I'm attracted to you, Marty. That's why he's here, and that's why he's trying to kill us both. Not to mention that what we just did is so completely unethical that I could slap myself in the face. This isn't The Prince of Tides, you're sick and I've got my own problems."

"I'm not sick," he said simply.

Cafi stopped throwing clothing. "I'm not trying to offend you, but I don't know what else to call it."

"Do you have the note my father left you?"

"It's in the kitchen."

"Show me."

She sighed, wearing out. Too much had been happening, she needed to sit down and think for a few minutes, but instead she stepped past Marty into the brightly-lit kitchenette.

"Where is it?" she asked, glancing over the counter. "It was right here."

The Big Red she had been drinking a few days ago was still sitting on the edge of the sink. The garbage can held a red-stained napkin. But the note had vanished.

She went into the living room, thinking that she had put it down on the coffee table, but the carefully written note was no where in sight. "I don't understand," she said, her anger lost. "I wouldn't have hidden it, it's got to be here."

"I don't think it was ever here," Marty told her.

She turned to look at him.

"If Jeremy can split up the time-line, why can't he create a letter? You said my father had decided not to tell me about these fits I was having, but knowing Dad, I would have been in a hospital months ago. He's been fanatical about my health all my life, he wouldn't let something like that go untreated."

Cafi shook her head weakly. "So it was never here. Just another hallucination." She sank down onto the couch. "I've worked with almost a hundred single soulmates. None of them ever experienced anything like this."

"It didn't happen to me," Marty agreed. "Did...Is there anything about Jeremy you haven't told me?"

She forced down the lump in her throat. "Like what?"

He stepped slowly across the room and sat down beside her. Cafi knew she should get up, walk away from him, but that same feeling of desperation that had been hanging over her head for the past few months was back in full force. She was sick of mourning and waiting and remembering. She just wanted to get on with things now, live her life again.

"Did Jeremy hit you?" Marty asked point-blank.

Cafi snapped her face away. "No. Of course not. He loved me. I can't believe you even asked that."

Marty's voice was gentle. "People do strange things when they're in love."

"He didn't hit me!"

There was a moment of silence, and then thunder rumbled distantly. The room was blue and cold, it had gone without heating for weeks. "If you leave," Marty said, "he'll just do it again. The next guy, the one after him. One of these times he really will kill you."

She turned her head to look at him. "Can you even get rid of him?"

Seafoam green waves rolled behind his eyes. "It won't be easy, but natural order is on my side. I can lock him out of this world."

Why on earth had she let him sit so close to her? The room was freezing and she could feel his body like a space heater beside her.

"And you'd really do it for me?" she asked.

Marty smiled. "You didn't need to ask me that."

"I know. I just wanted to hear you say yes."

"Yes."

Then she leaned forward and kissed him again, and his arms were so warm around her, it was such a comfort to be held again. She could rest here, with a depth of comfort sleep didn't offer and a sense of protection she couldn't give herself.

Then she was just sitting there in his lap, looking into the kindest face she'd ever seen while Marty ran a hand through her hair. He gave her another tender smile, and as they were resting there, so close together, there was no hiding and no awkwardness.

Then the dead mice began to fall.

It started sounding like the brush of wind against the windows, and then grew steadily to a plop, plop against the wood floor. Marty’s eyes focused on something over her shoulder, but as Cafi turned to look his hand covered her eyes.

"Don't," he whispered.

Something hit her thigh, landed on her thigh, and instinctively she went to brush it away. Her fingers touched something small and oval, with four sticks poking out of one side and slick fur covering it.

She knew that feeling, knew if from the dreams where furry rat hands pushed her down into the rotting shredded newspapers that made up the nest. She knew that scent, of animal oils and dander and paws so infected the scales between them had been pulled taut.

"It's a hallucination," Marty kept telling her. "They aren't real. It's just Jeremy trying to hurt you."

God, it was on her thigh and she could feel it growing, getting larger, expanding, not just a dead mouse but a huge rat, it was growing so heavy, accumulating mass, pressing her down. She couldn't help opening her eyes and seeing the massive limp rodent that had gotten so large it was brushing her breasts now, with it floppy dead ears. It's tail was hanging down, knotting around her ankle.

"It's not real," Marty said again, and shoved the thing onto the floor. Cafi choked to see him touch it, the panic was welling so fast, her lungs were expanding, trying to scream, really really just having to scream.

Marty set her down on the couch, kicking the now cat-sized rat away from her, but all around dead mice were falling like rain, falling like a hail storm in Hell. They littered the floor, the furniture cushions, the kitchen counter. Their bodies splattered with the force of the impact, sometimes rib cages split and pierced their deteriorating hides to flash gooey red in the air.

"Enough!" Marty shouted. Cafi shook her head, gasping for air.

"Enough, do you hear me? This is my home, you are most certainly not welcome here."

Not working, not working. The mice were coming faster and faster, rolling into each other like jacks in a child's game, covering the floor boards and leaking rank fluids.

Cafi saw Marty grit his teeth and close his eyes, and a moment later a handful of broken glass came flying from above the front door. Some shards collided with the falling mice, but they all turned to water when they hit the floor, a pool of the purest, thinest water.

The mice stopped falling. The bloated dead rat, which was as large as a small retriever now, flickered and then faded. One by one, the mice followed suit.

Cafi was still hyperventilating. She reached out to clench the arm of the couch, making sure to look before she put her hand down. It couldn't be over. This was just a reprieve before Jeremy came up with something worse, much worse, and if she didn't pay now she would tonight in her dreams.

Marty was on his knees on the floor, chest heaving just as hard. He glanced at her. "Do you need to scream?" he asked.

She shook her head mutely, and he forced a smile. "Good."

Back in the main house, they drank hot beef stew from coffee mugs at the kitchen table and munched crackers. "I still don't understand how you made him stop," Cafi said as she forced her hands to relax around the mug.

"It's a safety device my grandfather put into all these buildings," Marty told her. "He ran a string of silver through the outer walls and then connected the ends at a crystal ball above the front door. If there's ever a time when something is attacking me inside the guest house, I can break the ball and it will instantly create a protection circle, clearing the house. There used to be one in here, too, but I don't think we ever replaced it after the fire."

"I didn't see a crystal."

"Well..." He smiled sheepishly, unsure how to explain it to her. "It's not a physical crystal."

"Then why were there pieces of it on the floor?"

He shrugged. Some things in magic couldn't be explained.

Her color was beginning to come back, he noticed. He'd thought she might freeze to death on the way back to the house, she fell down so often in the snow. Emotionally, it seemed like she could deal with anything, but dead mice were another story.

He watched her drink her soup and thought, Did she really kiss me earlier? Twice?

He wasn't sure why it surprised him so much, Goddess knew he was drawn to her, and there was a certain intimacy that came from curling up together two nights in a row. One of the old Chimera customs ordained that "a good Chimera will sleep peacefully in the same bed with his beloved the night after he has asked for her hand." Having been written in the 1800's, Marty expected that "peacefully" really meant, "Don't try anything."

Cafi glanced up. "You're staring."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Her eyes closed briefly. "I'm tired and I feel really stupid is all."

"Stupid?"

"They're just dead mice, I know that. I mean, in my head I know that."

Marty set his cup down and leaned against the table edge. "Your panic attacks may not have anything to do with the mice."

"How does that work?"

"Jeremy may be using some of his energy to induce feelings of panic and terror in you."

She blinked again, pressing a hand to her forehead. "Is there anything he can't do?"

Marty wanted to reassure her and couldn't think of anything to say. He had dealt with malignant energies before, he knew that they could be hard to control.

"We'll just have to do our best."

She nodded, swallowing hard. "Can we do it now?"

"Better to wait until nightfall. I need the moon. Also, there's a book I need to get fron Circ Gri."

"That's the other farm, right?"

"Right. It's about twenty minutes from here by horseback, so I should be back in an hour."

She looked at him in surprise. "You're going alone?"

"I thought you'd want to rest for a little while."

"I'm not staying here by myself. I'm not doing anything by myself until I know Jeremy is solidly trapped in Never Land."

He risked a smile. "Can you ride?"

She scoffed lightly. "Can I ride? Of course I can ride." She took another gulp of her soup and added under her breath, "As long as I'm tied to the horse."

The horses started whinneying the minutes she stepped into the barn. Marty glanced at her with raised eyebrows and she shrugged, closing the door against the wind that was picking up outside.

"Horses don't like me," she said.

"They haven't even smelled you yet."

"I know. They hate my aura. Seriously, my horseback riding coach dumped me after four lessons."

"Sounds like a lousy coach," Marty said, striding toward the tack room.

Cafi followed. "He's a judge at the Olympics," she admitted, and earned herself another glance.

"Well," Marty said, handing her a saddle and picking one up himself, "I don't think we'll be taking Frolicksome Baby out tonight. Let's see how Old Jill's feeling."

The barn was heated for the winter, and the yellow lights hanging from the high ceiling cast a warm, orange glow over the hay. The air smelled of wheat and horse dung and animal sweat, not an entirely pleasant smell, but not rancid enough to send Cafi fleeing.

Old Jill looked mostly dead. She was leaning against the wall with her head down, something Cafi had never seen a horse do before, and her rubbery lips rolled in and out with a farting sound as she breathed.

"Jill," Marty said, opening the stall door and setting the saddle on a special post. "Come on, Jill, wake up. Ready to go for a ride? Come on."

He rubbed her flank a few times and then tugged at the horse's bridle until she opened her eyes. They were huge, honey-colored orbs, nothing like normal horse eyes, but they saw well enough to recognize Cafi as an intruder.

Jill swung her weight back onto her feet and let out a furious whinny, which sent the other horses into fresh cries of their own. "Jill," Marty warned, taking a firm hold on her bridle. "Easy, take it easy."

He fished a sugar cube out of his pocket and fed it to her as Cafi retreated to the other side of the gate. She watched him calm the horse and clamp the saddle to her back, his effortless working of the various buckles and straps involved. "Come on in here, Cafi," he said when he was done.

"I don't know," she began, and he lifted his head and smiled at her.

"She won't hurt you. I promise."

Cafi opened the gate. Old Jill stomped a front hoof, but didn't try to back away until Cafi was all the way inside the stall. "It's all right," Marty said. She didn't know if he was talking to her or the horse.

He reached out for her hand, and pulled her slowly to the horse's side. "Good. Give her a few rubs, Cafi, let her know you're a friend. Great. Now, one foot on my hands, and swing yourself up. Take hold of the pommel here."

Cafi grimaced and put her foot on the webbed finger-sling Marty held out. She grabbed hold of the pommel and threw her left leg into the air. It hit the saddle at the knee, and as she tried to slide it further over, kicking futially for the stirrup, Old Jill decided it was safer to be near Marty than this stranger. She took a few side steps toward him, rolling just far enough to send Cafi over her other side and onto the ground.

Marty crouched down and peered at her between the horse's legs. "Are you okay?" he asked quickly.

Cafi groaned and rolled one wrist. "I'm all right," she grumbled. "But horses don't like me."

He covered his mouth with one hand, trying to hid his smile. "Well, you warned me."

"Don't you have anything calmer?"

"Old Jill is about as close to death as they come this side of the glue factory. But..."

He stood up and coaxed her in front of Old Jill, then out the gate. "I do have something else," he said.

"What?"

"Let me unsaddle Jill and I'll show you."

Half an hour later they were flying across the sunset on a Viper 9000, a compact two-person snowmobile. It was about the size of a motercycle without wheels, and with the same basic layout. Cafi had never been fond of speed, especially since Jeremy died in a head-on collision, but Marty handed her a helmet, promised to go slowly, and said that it was either this or sitting home alone.

Jeremy was so far being quiet. Maybe he was tired, maybe he was just sulking. Either way, Cafi didn't want to take chances on being alone when he struck again.

And he would strike again. She knew him better than anyone, loved and hated him more than his parents had, his friends. God, how was it possible to miss him so intesely and dread his presence so deeply at the same time?

She realized now that her memories of him had begun to fade over the last few years. His faults had seemed less prominent in light of his death, his heart a little warmer to her. She remembered him with more fondness than she had felt when he was still with her, more sympathy.

Time heals all wounds, she thought, laying her cheek against Marty's back to keep the wind from rubbing it raw. She was wearing one of his jackets, the kind nobody even owned in New Mexico but was a must for Nebraska. Temperatures would easily drop to thirty below that night, Marty had told her before they left.

Her boots were covered in the snow that the Viper kicked up as they glided across the fields. The sun set in a beautiful smear of pink and orange and randy rouged purples, and from the east clouds rolled in to take over the sky.

"Looks like you might not get your moon," Cafi shouted as Marty began to slow in front of a large, dorm-like structure.

"What?" he asked, bringing them to a stop and turning off the engine.

"Can you do the spell without the moon?"

He glanced up, eyes peering through the sudden silence. "Yes," he said finally, but he didn't sound as sure as Cafi would have liked. "Come on, let's get inside."

Circ Gri--which Marty explained meant Gray Circle in Romanian, just as Tata Acasa meant Father's Home--was less sprawling than its counterpart. Between the five dorms and the big house were long corridors set a few feet into the earth, so that the inhabitants could move from one house to another without venturing into the freezing cold. At the top of a smaller hill sat a second barn, this one half the size of the one at Tata Acasa, and with a smaller pasture set around it.

Marty produced a ring of keys from his pocket and opened the front door. He frowned as they stepped inside. "It's warm in here."

"So?"

"It seems odd that they would have left the heat on while they left town."

He flicked on a light in the entrance way, and Cafi saw that Circ Gri must have been build more recently than Tata Acasa. The walls were made of smooth, painted wallboard instead of cedar planks, and many of the floors had been carpeted. It was nice, but somehow not as cozy and quaint as Tata Acasa.

"Do you hear something?" Cafi asked suddenly, putting her hand on Marty's arm.

He froze, then whispered, "Laughter?"

She shook her head. "Laugh track. Someone's watching TV."

They slunk across the entryway to a long hall, Marty sliding keys between his fingers so that they stuck out at dangerous angles as they walked. Then they reached an open doorway, beyond which was the blue light of a television, and without warning a shadow came hurtling from the room.

Marty went down, the slender figure on top of him, quick and supple like a dark fairy. Cafi grabbed at anything and ended up with a handful of cotton shirt and a painful kick to the skin before a feminine voice snapped, "Don't move, I have a gun."

Cafi stopped moving, but she didn't release the shirt. Marty said, "Karina?"

Whatever the woman was holding above her head was slowly lowered. "Marty?"

Cafi fumbled at the wall and managed to hit a light switch, which revealed a girl, not more than fifteen years old, sitting on Marty's chest and holding a soccer trophey club-like in one hand.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Karina asked, then laughed and hugged Marty.

He flashed Cafi a smile over the girl's shoulder to let her know everything was all right, and kissed Karina's ear. "What are you doing here?" he replied as she climbed off him and offered her hand.

"I got a stomach flu, so Dad said I could stay behind. Turned out to only be a twenty-four hour thing, so staying home was kind of a waste, but I don't have any way of getting to Gradina Rosu. Didn't you go with them?"

"No. Um, Cafi, this is Karina MacMarnine, my cousin. Karina, this is Cafi Dana..."

"A friend," Cafi finished, shaking Karina's hand. The girl was small but not in a thin way, short and built like a brick. Her hair and eyes were dark as oblivion, yet they sparkled with good nature. If she bore any resembalance to Marty, Cafi couldn't find it, and she wondered if all of the Chimera just referred to each other as cousins.

Karina glanced between them; if she suspected anything, she didn't feel the need to say it. "Nice to meet you. If I'd known you were home, Marty, I would have called you days ago to come play nursemaid."

He smiled and she hugged him again. "So what are you guys doing up here? Come for the tour?"

"I'm looking for a book," Marty told her.

"You plowed all the way through the snow for a book? Which one?"

"Georgana Book Three."

Karina stared at him for several long seconds. Her smile had faded when she said darkly, "What's going on, Marty?"

He sighed and glanced at Cafi. "You may as well tell her," she said simply.

Karina shared Marty's maternal streak, and insisted on making hot chocolate while they talked. The kitchen was long and imposing, but at one end was a breakfast nook where the three of them were able to sit close together and not feel as if they were hiding.

Marty told her the story; Cafi only spoke to describe the divergent paths their memories took. Other than that she listened, reliving it a little, and in doing so, gaining a sudden perspective that she hadn't had before. The pieces came together as she looked at them from above, Jeremy's fury, the broken timelines, their inability to communicate. All just one big plot.

She also realized something else: Marty was extremely private. He didn't mention that Cafi had slept in his arms two nights in a row, he didn't talk about the kisses. He glossed over the long conversation they'd had concerning his relationship with Shale and the performance of his opera pieces.

She brushed the hair out of her eyes to see him better, deep in thought. He had trusted her from the beginning it seemed, told her things that under normal circumstances he might not have. Because she was his therapist, he thought he could bar his soul. He had given pieces of himself in safety, with the understanding that his pain would ease in return.

And she had royally screwed him over. If anything, he was probably more confused now than he'd been before she arrived, and he was being stalked by an angry ghost to boot. The damage hadn't been intentional, of course, but it had been neglectful on Cafi's part. She should have kept her own barriers intact, remembered that Marty was a patient and not a blind date.

Stupid, stupid. He was still healing, he wasn't ready to love her and she was herself too needy to help him. If she even could help him. If these twelve-step programs she had been preaching the last three years weren't a pack of shit.

She made up her mind then that, if things went as planned, she would leave in the morning. Even if Marty didn't understand why, he would try to, he wouldn't stop her. She'd find the number of a therapist in Lincoln he could talk to and tell Circle Daybreak to forget about the book. Maybe then she'd have enough quiet to figure out what she was doing with her life.

"I'm coming with you," Karina said, tugging on a coat from the hall closet.

"You've been sick," Marty agrued. "You can't come out into the snow with me tonight."

"You've got a serious problem," she replied. "And you need all the witches you can get."

"Not sick ones who will be endangering their health."

Karina smiled, and Marty couldn't help smiling back. Of all the Chimera, he had a soft spot for Karina. Maybe because he had saved her life once, maybe just because she had such a rich heart. She was Circle Chimera's baby, the tiny, spirited girl they all doted on.

"Even babies grow up," she said, her eyes brushing across his forehead as if his thoughts appeared there like type. "Besides, it would be more dangerous for you to go out there alone. You open a circle around this guy and you don't know what might happen."

He sighed. "Okay, if you insist."

She kissed his cheek. "Let me go saddle my horse."

In the kitchen, Cafi finished drying their coco mugs and stuck them in a cupboard. Marty watched from the doorway. Her face was blank; although he hadn't been conscious of it, he'd grown used to her facial expressions. When she finished with the mugs, she smoothed the towel carefully over the oven rack and then leaned against the counter, her hands hanging limply into the sink.

He suddenly felt uncomfortable, anxious. He knew he was a bit nieve when it came to relationships, he knew that everything he was feeling at that moment would fit into the lyrics of a sixties tune, he knew he was a living cliche. But he was also aware that there was a deeper cord hanging between them. Not silver, not of sacred origins, but supple leather trying to draw them together. Letting him know there was a chance.

He could tell she was crying only by the motion of her arm as she reached up to brush tears away. "Cafi?" he asked finally, and she started.

"Yeah?" Rubbing at her eyes now, she turned when he touched her shoulder, for the first time alerted to the feel of the cloth under his fingers and the warmth of her body coming through it.

"What's wrong?"

She looked at him. Her face was dry, but her eyes were so distant she might have been searching for him through a London fog. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry," she said.

"There's nothing to be sorry for."

Now she focused a little on him, still distracted. "This is my fault, Marty. I brought him here."

"This is Jeremy's fault, if anyone's. He won't let go."

"He-" She stopped, and her gaze drifted way again. In a low voice soaked with old regret, she said, "It's my fault. When he was alive, I was always the one who-"

"No," Marty interrupted. "No matter what you think you might have done, it's not your fault."

He reached out for her hand, found the skin cool and motionless. His fingertips couldn't even find a pulse in her wrist. "You had every right to forget him," he added, and Cafi blinked, startled.

"You told me that," Marty said, giving her a soft smile.

She shook her head, and then stepped away, pulling out of his grasp as she went. Passing through the kitchen door, she said, "Then I was wrong."

For the second time that week, Marty decended into the valley between and just west of Tata Acasa and Circ Gri. Eight stone doorways, each soaring eleven or twelve feet high, marked the boundries of the Circle North American Chimera had been using for the last three hundred years. Eight small alters, each moved slightly inward from the doorways, were decorated with the moonstone discs Marty himself had placed there a few nights before. At the center was a round table of perfectly smooth stone, poreless, glistening as if wet with polish.

Cafi had only read about such places. Karina, appearing smaller than ever in a cloak of thick green wool, guided her through the eastern doorway. As they passed into the Circle, the temperature rose abruptly and the winded vanished as if blocked.

Marty had come through the northern doorway, holding a leather bag close to him. His cloak was deep gray, and matched the strange gray rawhide of his boots. She couldn't see his face among the shadows of the cowl, but his stance was deliberate and solomn as he place the bag, a sword, and a bowl of fresh snow on the table.

"What do I do?" Cafi whispered to Karina.

"Stand here," the girl replied, guiding her to one of the atlers. "It's okay, you can sit on it."

"Are you sure?"

Karina grinned at her. The light in the valley was unlike anything Cafi had seen before, rich dark blues, swirling lost blacks, indigo air filling the spaces between them. It illuminated everything, showed her even the tiny marks of Karina's eyelashes, but was as deep as soot.

"This isn't a church," Karina whispered. "In the summer time, we have picnics here."

Cafi couldn't imagine a bunch of guys chowing down on hot dogs and watermelon in the middle of a place that radiated holiness, but she sat down on the low, sturdy alter. Through the maroon cloak Marty had loaned her, she wasn't able to feel if the stone was cold. No snow, she realized, had come into this Circle, although it was more than three feet deep around them. No ice, either, no icicles hanging from the doorways.

Marty stood near the center table, his right hand brushing the stone. "I don't think I can do this," he said suddenly as Karina approached him. He didn't speak to Cafi, had barely spoken to her since their brief conversation in Circ Gri's kitchen, but the silence had been more contemplative than angry. He seemed deep in thought.

"Sure you can," Karina said now, reaching out for his hand. "You're great at this."

"No, I can't tonight."

Cafi watched Karina touch Marty's face, her palm slide against his cheek under the hood. He leaned into her as if resting, and then used his free arm to draw her slowly closer. They began to breathe together, their faces falling close, the puffs of misty breath coming at the same time and mingling. There was nothing sexual in their touches, but Cafi felt jealousy worm in her stomach anyway. She wanted to be the one standing there, reassuring him, helping him find the strength he needed. Karina lay her cheek against his, and suddenly their chests began heaving, up and down, pressed tightly together and then backing off.

The air swirled, wind shooting from one doorway to another like banners being hung. Cafi could see the Circle being drawn from brush strokes of gray paint. It closed them in like dirty glass, streaked with wet clay.

Karina had released Marty and was stepping very slowly away from where he stood with her eyes closed and hands lightly fisted. She reached into the leather bag and removed a clod of dirt almost as big as her head. Someone had hand packed it; there were bits of grass and roots sticking out of the perfect sphere in every direction. Karina set it on the center of the table and then stepped back away, tiptoeing as if not to disturb anything.

Marty's mouth moved, seemingly without sounding. He opened his hand and Karina put a knife with a long, thin blade into it, like a nurse handing the doctor a scalpal. From out of the bag came a hard-covered book that Cafi recognized from the Circ Gri library; Karina had described it as being one of the most dangerous collections of knowledge Circle Chimera possessed.

Georgana Book Three.

It was not an old book as Cafi had expected, but a new edition Circle Chimera's elders had comissioned three years earlier. The originals, which had power of their own, had been destroyed, and these tidy, inconspicuous volumes put in their place.

Karina began to speak, calling corners, calling spirits, calling a guardian. She spoke in both English and Romanian, the changes seemingly random, and her voice held in the air as if she were in a small room and not outdoors. The streaks of gray hanging between the doorways became opaque and then suddenly almost transparent.

What happened next she didn't understand. Marty opened the book to a marked page and began to read slowly in Romanian. Karina lit twelve white candles in a circle around the dirt clod, and with the added light, Cafi was able to make out a roughly shaped nose. Marty lifted his voice, and the words fell into a rhyming pattern, a a foreign poem. Karina added another circle of candles, this time black. The table sent light in every direction, became a bonfire so bright Cafi couldn't see beyong it into the night.

Then the head rose.

First it tilted, eye sockets appearing. It leaned back to look up at the moon, and then it floated, simply floated into the air on the cloud of gray mist gathering beneath it.

Cafi choked and started to get to her feet, only stopping when Karina sent her a quick warning glance. The cloud expanded and then shrank, tendrils thickening.

Shoulders. Arms. Hands. Fingers, for christ's sakes.

Just as she had with the snowman, Cafi recognized her soulmate's form, the slant of his chest, the curves of his stomach. He climbed naked out of the cloud, a manaquin made of smoke, his edges defined only in motion as he turned his dirt-head to look at the ones who had called him.

Marty placed the book back on the table. Karina set the bowl, made of thin, hammered silver, down where only a few seconds before the dirt-head had sat. It was piled high with packed snow, and from a corked bottle, Karina sprinkled it first with water, then salt.

Marty picked up the knife and, without wincing, cut his wrist. It was a small cut, but it bled freely. He peppered the white snow with his glistening red blood, then accepted the gauze pad and exercize band Karina handed him to stop the flow with.

Cafi stood up as the head rolled to look at her. Karina and Marty seemed to be deliberately ignoring it, but Cafi couldn't stop looking as the mud was molded by invisible hands to look more and more like Jeremy.

Her eyes swam warm with tears. The love that she had so long regarded as a weakness took hold of her again, and she stepped forward at his misty bidding. How could she had been so alone for the past three years? How had she borne it? He was the one thing she needed more than air, the missing pieces of her self, the one who would love her for all eternity.

"There's a chance," she heard him say. The dirt mouth dripped bits of grass onto the table as it strained to speak. "We can be together."

She brushed the tears out of her eyes. She was so tired of being incomplete, she was so exhausted with convincing herself that she was strong enough not to need him. This had nothing to do with strength; it was destiny and to deny her love for him was sacreligious.

Her hands closed around the edge of the table, and she swung one leg up. "Cafi!" she heard Karina shout, and saw the sword in Marty's hand. Lord, what were they about to do?

Jeremy extended his hand to her, unable to move beyond the circle of candles. It held him like an isolation tank, like a doll in a glass case. Cafi pushed the hair out of her eyes so that she could pick her way across the table top better. She would get him out, no matter what. She wouldn't lose him this time.

"Cafi, get down!" Karina shouted, scrambling onto the table herself. Marty had the sword lifted over his head, ready to strike the figure.

Jeremy's eyes were both angry and pleading. Yes, he was still her love, still the same. He would be furious that she had left him for so long, but his punishment would come out of love, and laying in his arms afterward, the pain would ease out of her body. He would replace it with an understanding of him so deep they could have shared the same skin.

"Cafi, get down!" Karina said again, and Jeremy gestured with his eyes. Not pausing, Cafi swung her right elbow back, using her left arm to brace is, and knew even in the silence of wool hitting rock that Karina had rolled off the table and onto the Circle floor.

"Cafi."

Marty's voice cut through the haze. The night beyond the Circle was black, endless, like oil soaking the sky. Tendrils of gray smoke, Jeremy's hands, Jeremy's fingers trying to sooth her, stood out against the frail firelight of the candle circle.

Cafi turned, startled to hear an incarnate voice. Marty had put the sword down on the ground and was looking up at her without armor. "Please come down," he said simply.

"I'm going to be with him again," she replied. "I'm so tired, Marty...."

"I know," he said, "but this won't make the hurt go away."

"It will." She nodded, again and again, marveling inside at her own bubbling hysteria, trying to find a rock in herself and knowing only that above all, she wanted to be with Jeremy again. "It will, Marty, it will. All this stuff I've been saying is bullshit, we need each other, Jeremy and me, we were created to be together."

"Cafi, listen to yourself." He pushed the hood of his cloak back and the candlelight lit his green eyes up like Kryptonite. "Jeremy is trying to draw you in so that he can kill you. He's going to kill you, Cafi, and then you'll be stuck as a ghost, like him. You'll be trapped between worlds with him, and your life will be over."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jeremy moving rapidly, but her gaze remained focused on Marty, on that pleading in his face. She remembered how he looked the night they met. He had been shell-shocked and frail, and he hadn't uttered a sound when she touched his shoulder, when she spoke to him. So much like she had been where Jeremy died. They had both put their hearts away, frozen themselves at that moment in time and remained there, hovering between life and memory.

"Oh, Marty," she said. "God, I'm sorry, Marty. I tried to help you, I did everything I could think of. But it isn't in me. I'm not strong inside like you are, I don't have music or a father who would do anything for me or four dozen cousins trying to help. I can't go on counseling people, I don't have any sort of future. All I have is this chance to go back and...I need him."

"I need you," Marty whispered. "Cerridwen help me, I need you."

There were tears in his eyes. Cafi couldn't swallow, couldn't speak. He was standing three feet below her in the dead of night, swearing his love before her soulmate.

Crippled, they were both crippled. Two cripples leaning on each other, clinging to each other, surfing cruel tides that didn't care where they washed up. If they were patient, if they healed each other as it came, if they remembered how to be alive while aware that the other was doing the same...

"I did this to you," she said. "I made him come here and hurt you."

He didn't try to deny it. He said, "I forgive you," and held out his hand, and said, "Come here, Cafi. Stop fighting the hurt and just come rest with me for a little while."

Rest a little while. When she tried to breathe, her guts were shredded up inside. "I can't."

"You can. Just jump off the table, and everything will be fine. No more nightmares, no more dead mice."

She started crying. She couldn't help it, just the memory of the dreams and the mice was enough to hurt her. Her heart would stop if it happened again.

"I will sit guard by your bed all night," Marty told her. "I'll build Circle after Circle around you, give you dreams in pastel colors. You'll be completely safe."

Hold onto me, Marty, she thought. Hold onto me while I fall apart, and the pieces will be yours to rearrange.

"Just once," he said, "let somebody hold your head above the water."

But...

But she was Cafi the All Powerful, Healer of Broken Hearts, Returner of the Will to Live. What would it mean if she gave in to that darkness she had been holding back for so long? What would she give up if she admitted that she couldn't hold on alone any more? Every little surrender to him had been a mistake, had brought Jeremy's wrath down on them even further. What would this ultimate submission mean?

She lifted her foot, uncertain as to whether she meant to step back or colapse into his arms.

Her heel hit a black candle. It fell crooked, knocking over both the next black one in line and a white one parallel to it. Like dominos, the ring holding Jeremy in spun to a mess of wax and dying wicks.

The air exploded with sleet.

Karina was slapping her when she opened her eyes. "Dammit, dammit!" the girl was hissing as she helped her sit up. "Come on, we've got to get him to the house."

"What?"

Cafi glanced around brokenly. The Circle had been shattered, frigid winds blew between the doorways and nipped at her face and hands. A glass-covered lantern with a manically dancing wick was on the alter, set down upon the mess of wax and burning out candles. Marty was slumped on the ground, one hand clutching the sword, the fingers of the other dug into that strange dirt-head.

"What happened?"

"You let him loose," Karina told her. She wasn't angry as much as she was rushed, Cafi realized, and something else. Afraid, maybe. Terrified. Karina was terrified.

"He rushed Marty, there was a bright light, I don't know what happened then. But we've got to get him into the house, Cafi, he's barely breathing."

It was true. She pushed her finger into his neck, looking for a pulse, and found his skin cold and doughy. His heartbeat felt like nothing more than a light breeze against the tip of her finger.

"We'll put him on the Viper," Karina said, "then you've got to drive him back to Tata Acasa."

"I can't drive that thing," Cafi told her, pushing back one of Marty's eyelids. His puipul was enermous, it covered almost all of the green.

"You've got to, unless you want to ride my horse, and you can't ride like I can. Now's not the time to be scared, okay? Marty's going to die if we leave him out here."

It had started snowing again. Not a little, either, the flakes were pouring down on them. "Forget the stuff," Karina said, shoving Georgana Book Three down the front of her turtleneck and then ignoring everything else. "Help me pick him up."

Neither one of them were large, but Karina was strong as hell. They managed to load Marty onto Cafi's back and she scuttled, doubled over, to the snow-mobile parked outside the Circle. Karina strapped him in and tucked his hands inside the woolen cloak.

Her horse cried out, almost invisible a few feet away. "Do you know the way back? Never mind, just follow me."

Cafi didn't even know if she could see Karina, but she revved up the Viper and took hold of the steering wheel. Her hands were shaking, and not just with cold. Marty was slumped beside her. He looked dead already, limp and flat like an empty garbage bag.

"God, don't let me have killed him," she moaned, seeing Karina and the horse like a brown shadow and turning the Viper in that direction.

She had no idea what had happened. One minute she had been watching the procedings with a measure of calm, and the next she was swooning. Damn Jeremy, hadn't he always been able to effect her like that? Hadn't he always talked her out of the pain he inflicted, convinced her no matter how deep the hurt went that his love could save her?

If Marty died, she was simply going to kill herself, find Jeremy, and send him to whatever form of Hell might exist. The plan wasn't even a plan in her mind, it was a reality. If Jeremy took Marty's life, he was going to pay.

Karina was almost impossible to follow. The horse seemed to move from far out to the left to the near right with unnatural speed. Either it was gifted with magical speed, or else Cafi was following trees.

"Cafi?" Karina called, off to the right.

"Karina?"

"You okay?"

"I think so!"

"I'm going to speed up a little."

Cafi swallowed. She took one numb hand and brushed the snow off the spedometer. Supposedly, the Viper could go up to forty miles an hour, and she was only doing twenty-five now. She wasn't sure about Karina's horse, but a moment later she was gunning to thirty-two just to keep up.

The horse was just a few feet in front of her, and she started easing back on the gas to keep from running it down. That's about the last thing we need, she thought, and then Karina's mount tripped. It was a momentary tremble, just a stumble, but it lasted long enough that the horse's speed was greatly reduced, and the Viper's wasn't....

Cafi slammed on the breaks, but the snowmobile hydroplaned, and she spun wildly to the right. There was the terrible scream of an animal, dampened by the snow. Cafi reeled and slid out of her seat as the horse's head knocked against her, so much larger and denser. She clung onto the steering wheel and her foot twisted frantically for something to wedge under. Karina screamed, tossed into the air like a spiked volleyball, and landed somewhere in the netherland of whites as the horse went down nearly on top of the Viper.

Marty, unbelievably, was still strapped in and unconscious beside her. Cafi wrapped her arm around the steering column and managed to brace herself against the back of the driver's seat. In doing so, she crammed her foot down by accident on the gas pedal, and the Viper shot off across the snow with impossible speed.

It was like being at the top of a rollercoaster and then falling without warning, only this time, the ride didn't go fifteen feet before it stopped.

Cafi didn't see the tree until it was about three feet in front of her. There was no time to even turn the wheel, no time to scream before the Viper collided with a trunk along the ride side.

Just like the Titanic, she thought, took a chunk out of the side and everybody drowned. The snowmobile shot up, as if it was trying to drive the side of the tree. Cafi snapped back like a paddleball on the retreat and lost her grip on the steering wheel so fast she didn't even feel it. Then she was tumbling, violently, out of control, and a pain dug into her left shoulder like spurs into the side of a horse.

Then she stopped. For a few long seconds, she didn't think or breathe. It was almost a meditation, a time to realize that she was still alive.

She opened her eyes. She didn't want to, but she couldn't help it.

There was nothing but white above her. Nothing but white in her field of vision. Her face was already dusted with snow.

Can I move? she wondered. Do I want to?

She didn't want to. She knew that if she started moving, she would have to get up and see what could be done, try to get Marty back to the house. Try to get Karina. She'd probably have to shoot the horse.

And she didn't want to fight any more.

So this is the end, she thought wonderously. Damn, it's cold enough. Why am I still thinking sarcastic thoughts if this is the end of my life? Shouldn't I be gentle and retrospective by now?

The thought that the end of her life would be just as silly and human as the rest of it amused her. But instead of laughing, she began to cry. Her chest started to shake, awakening the soreness and injuries all over, alerting her mind to the pain.

"Oh, god," she moaned. "Why is this happening?"

She couldn't get up, and she couldn't try to fix it all again. She was finished with fixing things, herself, other people, broken hearts, empty pages. Let them stay the way they were, she'd done her time. She'd been Cupid's bitch and preached universal love. Screw it. She was going to die now, alone in the snow, and Marty and Karina were going to die with her. So was the horse. Nothing she had tried to do in her life had done good. None of the fights against anger and depression and God had been won.

She stopped crying, stopped struggling against the snow. Stopped forcing herself to breathe, stopped trying to ease the pain in her ribs. Stopped trying to stay alive.

She stopped.

And she waited.

And after a few minutes, she realized that nothing was happening.

It was the ultimate irony, she thought, as she gritted her teeth and climbed to her knees. She had spent three years trying not to give in to the allure of Death, and when she finally did, Death wasn't interested.

"So that's the lesson," she groused, standing up and viewing through a haze of storm the fence her body had flown through. "You can give up to the pain, and it really won't kill you."

She started crying again when she reached the Viper, and made herself stop. No use crying, no use giving in when the one taking didn't want. Her inner guilt trip had come to the end of the road. If God was going to make her live through this, obviously he had some sort of plan, and she'd been fighting for too long to take God on.

It was unbelievable; Marty was still buckled safely into the Viper. It had turned over on its side in the snow, and his head was hanging a foot or so above the ground, relatively sheltered from the storm by the bulk of the vehicle. The motor was still sputtering.

Cafi couldn't quite take it in. She stood beside the Viper for a moment, then reached out to take Marty's pulse. Was it possible that his heart was beating more steadily than it had been before the accident?

She didn't try to understand. Fate had obviously played a hand in this; she didn't want a look at the cards.

It wasn't too hard to get the Viper upright again, and with a little gas the engine stopped sputtering and began to pur. There was a hell of a dent in the right side, but Cafi was able to get them moving again after a moment's quenched dread.

She turned the Viper around and started back the way she thought they had come, and within twenty seconds time, the horse's cries reached her ears. Karina was on her side, blinking and then passing out, blinking and passing out.

"Wake up," Cafi murmured, brushing the girl's face clean of snow. "Come on, wake up and let's get out of here."

"Bubbles," Karina said. "Can't leave Bubbles."

Cafi didn't try to argue, just dragged Karina under the arms and dragged her to the Viper's side. There, Karina seemed to wake up more fully, and was able to use her legs a bit as Cafi set her on Marty's lap.

"Poor Bubbles," she intoned solmly, but then she gave Cafi a strange smile. "I was trying to convince my dad that she wasn't ready for the glue factory just yet. Guess I was wrong."

Cafi guided the Viper carefully around the horse, which had stopped crying and was beginning to blink sleepily. No sarcastic thoughts for that one, she thought. Aloud, she said only, "Do you know where we are?"

"Straight up the hill, and about a hundred yards after that. Try to stop before you reach the house."

She was smiling again. Tired and bummed about her horse, but still smiling. "We're going to live, aren't we?" Cafi asked hoarsly.

Karina's grin widened. "I don't see what choice we have," she replied. "But you'd know better than I would."

Marty wasn't entirely surprised to find himself in a coffee bar. It was warmly lit, and the table he was at was situated in a corner just beyond the lights. Blue carpet covered the walls, polished redwood beams lined the floor, and the mug his coffee sat in was chunky ceramic.

Through the windows on the far side of the room, he could see that it was snowing outside. A couple came in through the front door and hung their coats on the rack, but Marty didn't realize that the girl was Shale until her shook her hair out of her hat.

He stood up, but she knew where he was, and she was already moving in his direction. The guy she'd come in with followed her.

Shale stopped on the other side of the table. "Hi," she said, and sighed.

Marty lifted his hand and she said, "It's not a good idea for you to touch me."

"Oh." He lowered his hand. "Hi."

She smiled. "You've gained a lot of weight. You look great."

"Thanks. You look terrific yourself."

Shale blushed. The guy, who had silk blond hair and eyes an even, pale blue, coughed, and Shale laughed nervously. "Sorry, I forget to introduce you. Evan, this is Marty O'Bach. Marty, this is Evan Liberance."

Evan nodded slightly to Marty but didn't try to shake his hand. "Shall we sit down?"

Marty sank back into his chair. He couldn't take his eyes off Shale's face, she was the picture of health. Those brown eyes that had been so weighted with old pain the last time he saw her were clear and warm.

"What am I doing here?" he asked, because he wanted to know if they were going to make him leave. He thought they probably would; Shale couldn't let him touch her, and somewhere deep inside, he could still feel Cafi and Karina nearby.

"Time to wrap this up," Evan said. "Ah, there he is."

Marty pulled his eyes away from Shale in time to see a beautiful, dark-haired boy emerge from the men's room. He knew it was Jeremy from the way the guy sneered as soon as he saw him.

"Sit down," Evan suggested.

With Jeremy, the table was full. Marty moved back a little so that he didn't have to risk bumping the guy's knees with his own, and possibly incurring his wrath.

"What's this about?" Jeremy demanded.

"It's over," Shale told him.

"What's over?"

"The Centry is sick of you wrecking havoc," Evan said evenly. "They're also tired of trying to keep you from killing people they have prophesies about."

"This wimp?" Jeremy asked, pointing to Marty.

Evan sighed. "Apparently he's important to someone," he said breezily, somehow dismissing and mocking Jeremy at the same time. "Meanwhile, you have to come with me."

"And go where?"

"Back to Heritage."

The air around Jeremy darkened as though he were in the first stages of human combustion. "They said I could have two weeks!"

"Two weeks to make peace," Evan told him, "not to harrass your soulmate. Not to try to reenter the mortal world. And certainly not to attempt murder on two people who are rather important to the Fate of the world. Now," he pulled what looked like a Romulan phaser out of his pocket, "we can do this the easy way, or the hard way."

Jeremy glanced at each of them, his eyes jumping like a skipping stone, and then his hands flew up around Marty's neck. Marty's own natural inclination to give in quietly to people with weapons hadn't prepared him for the attack, and his chair flipped over backwards with a hard crack against the floor.

"Goddammit," Evan said. Marty watched his feet under the table as he tried to stand up and get past Shale's chair to where they were wrestling on the floor, but suddenly Jeremy released a thick, surprised grunt and he went slack on top of Marty.

Uncertain, Marty stopped moving. Over Jeremy's shoulder, he could see a petite, underweight black-haired girl wearing battered jeans and a gray tee-shirt, and holding a wine bottle in one hand. She took her sunglasses off and glared across the table.

"Why is it that every time we plan to have dinner, I end up helping you haul some disgruntled badass back to Heritage?" she demanded.

Evan stepped around the table and lay a kiss on her cheek. "Hi, hon."

She grinned and shoved him away. "I got his legs."

"Fair enough."

Together, they lifted Jeremy off the floor. Marty watched them carry him out the cafe door, the girl making snide remarks all the way. They vanished outside, and he sank slowly back into his chair.

He and Shale were completely alone then. He swallowed. "I don't know what's going on here."

She nodded. "It's confusing. Don't worry too much about the specifics, I just wanted you to see that Jeremy won't be a problem any more."

"This is what you do now? Play police to ghosts making trouble?"

She nodded again.

"For how long?"

"Until you die, I guess." She chuckled. "But take your time. I'm having fun."

"Fun," he repeated, thinking of the past year, how hard it had been sometimes just to open his eyes. "I'm not having fun, Shale."

Her face softened. "I know. I'm sorry, Marty, I didn't plan to die."

She stopped. There was too much past to get into it all then; they'd have needed weeks, and Marty understood intuitively that time was short.

"I miss you," he said, because that was all that really mattered. "I love you."

Her eyes started to fill. "Same here. We've just got to wait a while."

He shook his head. "Jeremy was right, this is crazy. I should just kill myself."

"No, no, Marty, don't. It'll just mess things up more." When he looked at her, she tried to explain. "Suicides don't end up in the same place. There are...therapies...Marty, just don't, okay? Take my word that it won't help."

"Okay," he said, defeated. "But what am I supposed to do? Don't you even have some Divine wisdom to give me?"

There were tears rolling down her cheeks, but she smiled. "Live, Marty. That's all the Divine message I have. Go out and live and love everything and everybody, and don't feel guilty about it for a second."

"How can I not feel guilty?"

She just kept smiling. "Honestly, could you ever forget me? Will you ever stop missing me? Give me a corner of your heart, just a corner. That little point at the very bottom will do, and fill the rest of it with the whole world. Go write operas and make the Chimera respected and fall in love. Get married, have kids. I won't be mad at you for it."

He put his head in his hands. "Keep fighting. You're telling me to spend my whole life fighting."

"No." Her voice was soft. "I'm telling you to stop fighting entirely."

He felt her fingers brush his wrist, as gentle as the wind in late summer. He didn't speak, and neither did she, he just leaned against the table with his eyes closed and tried to memorize the stroke of her skin against his. If he could hold onto it, make it part of him...

"You've got to go," she whispered. He lifted his head and met her eyes, and her bottom lip was trembling just a bit.

"Okay," he replied.

She walked him to the door, and he found his cloak, the same one he'd worn to the Circle, hanging from a peg on the wall. He slipped it on, found its weight comforting, and touched one hand to the doorknob.

He paused, then turned. Shale was standing behind him, and before he thought about what he was doing, he'd caught her up in his arms and was holding onto her with all his strength.

She was crying, her tears were hot and wet and real against his neck. "Oh, Marty," she kept whispering. "I love you, I love you. I'm so sorry. I love you."

He didn't know how long he stood there next to the door hugging her, but when she raised her head, he knew they really were out of time. He kissed her full on the mouth, let himself linger there just long enough to make the memory last, and then turned away with his eyes closed, groped for the door, and left without ever having to say goodbye.

Cafi covered Karina with a thick afgan and sighed. The girl bruised, swollen, and still a little bloody, but apparently nothing was broken. "We Chimera don't beat up so easily," she said. "Especially when we land in big soft snow drifts."

Marty was asleep in an upstairs bedroom, Karina was sacked out in Marty's room. Cafi went into the kitchen and made herself another cup of the insanely strong coffee the Chimera drank, finding it a little less brutal this time. She'd attempted to go to sleep twice already, and each time found that she couldn't relax. Marty's father had been called at Gradina Rosu ("Your son is hurt, your neice is hurt, and one of your horses is dead. I'm sorry to bug you, but would you mind coming home?") and would be arriving late the next morning with a vanful of people. Cafi thought he'd been very nice, considering, and Karina had promised to explain everything once he was back.

Cafi pulled the curtain closed over the kitchen windows, finding the night too deep to look at. I didn't even write the damn book, she realized, and could only chuckle. She wasn't sure what she'd write any more. Maybe that no one had a choice about living in the end, they could either chicken out and kill themselves or get off their asses and make the best of it.

No, that wasn't a harsh thing to tell people in deep despair.

Wrapping her hands around the coffee, but for once not surprized at the cold drafts in the house, she walked up the stairs. Karina had suggested Marty stay in one of the upstairs bedrooms that had a fireplace, so that the hypothermia that had set in wouldn't have a chance to dig any deeper into his skin. They'd chosen a small room, with a fireplace just a few feet from the end of the bed, and a petite couch where Cafi could sit.

She opened the door and stepped inside as quietly as she could, and was startled to see Marty awake. He was laying on his back, face brushed with orange and yellow lights from the fire, and staring at the ceiling.

Cafi paused, and then closed the door with a purposeful click. Marty's eyes glanced her way, and he said in a rough voice, "Did you lie to me?"

She tried to step back and her foot hit the closed door. A few drops of hot coffee sloshed over the side of the mug and stung her hand. "What?"

Marty twisted to sit up higher, and winced. "Did you lie about Jeremy hitting you?" he asked, but he didn't sound angry. Just tired.

Cafi took a few steps forward, until she could touch the footboard of the bed and make out the starburst pattern of the quilt. "Yes," she said finally, hating herself for speaking at all.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was a weak idiot for putting up with it."

Marty smiled then, sweetly. "You didn't think I would understand going through hell just to be with a soulmate? I would have understood, Cafi. And maybe when he jumped me in the afterlife, I wouldn't have been so surprised."

More coffee spilled on her hand. "You should put that down," Marty noted, and when she went to set it on the bedside table, he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her onto the mattress. She tucked her legs up underneath her, facing him, ashamed to look at him.

"I'm such a fraud, Marty."

"I don't believe that."

"I'm always taking about being strong and dealing with it and facing the deamons, and I spent eight years letting him knock me around. Eight years of defending him to my parents, trying to hide bruises, lying to myself." She hid her face behind her palms as the tears started coming. "I didn't go to that school in New York because the night before I was supposed to leave, he shut my hand in a car door and broke all the bones. Those dreams where the rats come...just memories I keep trying to forget. All the things he made me do....and I couldn't stop him, because I'd look into his mind and see how even he couldn't control it, how he wasn't even to blame. The anger was just more than he could control, and I always forgave him when I should have been running...."

"Shh, shh." She felt his arms around her again, drawing her against his chest and letting her cry. "What's done is done. Jeremy's not coming back."

"How do you know?" she asked, falling weakly against him.

"Because....I'll tell you about it later, if I can. But I promise he's not coming back. Close your eyes, Cafi. Don't try to be the strong one tonight."

Then it was said, and she was sick of being the strong one anyway. If giving up on life hadn't killed her, surely Marty's comfort wouldn't.

"Don't let go," she whispered.

"I'm not letting go. I swear I won't let go."

They rocked a little. She stopped crying and just let herself lay against him bonelessly. "Marty," she said, her voice barely above a breath.

"Yeah?" he responded just as softly.

"I love you."

He stopped rocking, and then he started again. "I'm not letting go of you," he whispered, his lips brushing her earlobe. "I'm not letting go." Her chin. "I swear." Her cheek. "This time I'm not letting go of you." Her mouth.

The fear had frozen her, and the relief had melted her, and now he patted her so gently back into place. Cafi had never felt kisses so sweet, so lavish. Marty acted as if they had all the time in the world, and when she opened her eyes, no dead mice fell. They were the only ones making the bed rock.

When they had landed side by side, with their heads at the foot of the bed, Cafi paused. "We're on the same time-line now, aren't we?"

He smiled michiveiously. "I think so. Want to repeat the last half hour and make sure we remember the same thing?"

She ran a hand across his forehead. "What I meant was, are you okay?"

He kissed her nose. "Are you?"

"I'm scared to leave."

"Then stay."

She searched his eyes, looking for some glimmer of doubt. "Are you sure?"

"Stay tonight," he repeated. "Stay tomorrow. Stay forever, Cafi, I won't complain."

She knew it was, as her mother might have said, "rushing headlong into disaster," but when had sitting quietly ever gotten her anywhere?

Marty's lips were rumbling about under her chin again. "Okay," she agreed simply, and felt him smile.

The hotel room in New York was unlike anything Marty had ever seen. Marble and silk everywhere, mints on the pillows, figures in the soaps, and where did all these fresh flowers keep coming from? He had a balcony that offered an exquisit view of the city, a special closet that would heat his robe, and a television that not only had four hundred channels but would jump out of the wall for him.

It was his third night in New York, the one he'd come here to see, and the performance of the opera, his opera, was set to begin in two hours. He brushed his tux again with the lint brush, because he thought the brush was nifty, and heard a knock on the door connecting his room to Cafi's.

She had the most adorable ideas about restraint. "We had our night of wildness," she'd told him, "now we have to stop acting like horney teenagers."

He'd lifted his eyebrows, and she giggled, but they had been very proper since Marty's father came home, which had been amusement enough. He hadn't known whether to hate Cafi for almost killing his son, or pay her for putting him in such a good mood. Finally he had just said, "If you say it's going to be all right, Marty, I guess I'll take you at your word."

He was in a room down the hall, reason number two for the seperate rooms. Marty had left the connecting door open, just because he liked the idea, and Cafi had crawled in beside him the night before. They'd stayed up all night and still managed to be very proper.

"Come in," he called, setting the brush on the counter and turning.

"You have strange taste in clothes, Marty."

Cafi walked into the room wearing the biggest dress he'd ever seen. It was a soft tan color, with a huge circular skirt and sleeveless bodice. Her hair had been caught up with a violet flower clip that matched the necklace around her throat. She looked...sheepish.

"I can't believe I'm wearing this."

Marty couldn't help smiling. "You look incredible."

"I look like a skydiver with a faulty parachute."

He reached for her hand and turned her toward the mirror. "You look perfect."

She glanced at their reflections and ran a hand over the embroidered lace bodice of the dress. "You promise I'm not going to look completely out of place?"

"It's the opera, people wear all sorts of things."

She still looked worried, but Marty wasn't concerned. He'd chosen the dress the day before, after attending an afternoon showing of Othello. True, with Verdi in town he probably wasn't going to get big audiences, but he didn't mind. He was going to have a wonderful time.

It was funny; he and Cafi had planned that night for him to say goodbye to Shale, to put her behind him and move on, but now that it had arrived, he found he was already well into the future.

The phone rang twice. "That means the limo's here," Marty said.

Cafi glanced at the dress again in dismay. "Will I fit?"

"It's a stretch," he assured her.

They met his father in the lobby, and he was as impressed with Cafi's dress as Marty had been. She started to relax a little, and they walked together out the front door to where a long black limousine was waiting at the edge of the street.

Marty was helping her off the curb, aware of her very high heels, when he eyes caught on a spot of damp brown fur in the gutter. He tried to distract Cafi, but she had seen it again, and had gone still beside him.

They both stared at the rat, its fur matted and filthy, its head craned back in a position of final agony, and then Cafi said, "Somebody should tell the doorman to sweep that up."

Marty looked at her, and she shrugged. Then she grinned. "Come on," she said, "we're going to be late." She took a dainty step over the gutter and climbed into the limo.

The End

August 10, 1999

Tales From the Scarecrow