Second Sight

Ilsa J. Bick

I

I’m not, she thinks, I’m not Lily.

Her brain folds like an accordion, because there’s not-Lily, squeezing her consciousness against the bony vault of her skull.

I’m not Lily; I was, but now I’m not.

She’s naked, legs scissoring spaghetti twists of off-white sheet. Her expensive dress Mother picked for her that evening, the scarlet one slit from her ankles to her thighs and a vee plunging to her navel, pools on the floor like hot, fresh blood.

(Mother? Her mother is dead. Cancer. When her father started up with someone else—twenty-two and Lily’s only fifteen, and she might have to call that bitch Mom?) Her mind is very cold. The weatherman is forecasting snow by morning, and the mayor promised salt trucks and snow removal crews at the first flake. Yeah, and every guy in prison didn’t do it. This is Washington, for Christ’s sake. This is what Call-Me-Bob, the bald man with the big nose who’s chosen her for this evening, says as the news winks on. Call-Me-Bob’s breath is sharp as burned wood from Scotch, but he wants to watch the late news at the same time. He makes jokes. I like to watch, Eve. Even though Eve is not her name either.

And there is no Call-Me-Bob, not in this room, this bed where Lily lies.

Her skin prickles with the memory of jungle heat, though the only jungles Lily has seen are concrete and tarry asphalt and rusted steel. The village Not-Lily remembers is like something out of a movie, populated with people who have almond eyes and wear straw hats.

But she—Lily—is hot just the same. A burning flush oozes across her skin like lava. With a small impatient movement, she kicks her feet free.

Just as Not-Lily did when she was very small: wanting to be free of the coarse blanket yet scared to death of the monster beneath the bed; how Auntie, a black stinking ghost smelling of rancid flesh and fruity Special Muscle wine, chanted her muon to bring out the Rakshasas. The demons erupted from Auntie’s skin to sit on her chest, and they held her legs and arms so a son of Yama—naked, flat-faced and very hairy—could nibble her toes with his yellow fangs and bite her neck and hurt her in places that still cause her shame. Yet, always, her toes somehow grew back, and Auntie invariably melted into the Daylight Woman everyone else knew at the first hint of dawn. No one believed her about the nights. Every morning at the well the other girls tittered behind their hands even as they stoppered their mouths because it paid to be careful. You never could tell if a stray Rakshasa still lingered and might ride in on your breath so that not even a kru khmae What? Who?

could help you.

A table lamp splashes a fan of yellow light, and a thin silver-blue wash pulses from the television, its screen of silver fuzz scritch-scratching silent hieroglyphs like the yantra What?

which only the monks on Ko Len know. The DVD player’s red light winks like a lost firefly because Call-Me-Bob Mackie likes to watch.

No, it’s Mackie who can’t get enough of the damn awful thing. It’s Mackie.

There is enough light to see, or maybe she possesses some preternatural second sight, like a jungle cat for whom darkness does not matter and is, in fact, all to the better. Her eyes jerk over the ceiling of the hotel room. Tiny cracks fan the plaster, like the crackling glaze of a pottery vase, because the roof leaks and the way the manager figures it, the only people on their backs long enough to care are the girls. The johns aren’t shelling out twenty-five bucks for the view, for Christ’s sake.

Lying next to Lily/Not-Lily, Mackie sleeps, hugging the only pillow. Not Call-Me-Bob … and who is that?

Get up.

Gasping, she lurches upright, arms flailing, like a marionette whose puppeteer’s been caught napping. Mackie mumbles, shifts, doesn’t wake. The sheet pools at her waist. A scream balls in her Not-Lily mouth. But Lily doesn’t scream. Can’t.

Up, get up.

In the half-light, she staggers to her feet, clawing at air. The room’s so cold her nipples stand, and the floor’s icy against her soles, and she—Lily—wants her fluffy pink rabbit slippers, the ones her mama bought along with a thick pink terry-cloth robe for her thirteenth birthday. Lily wants to go home, where she was someone’s little girl once upon a time.

Not-Lily doesn’t care. Not-Lily can’t go home either. That they have in common. And there are other things.

She—Not-Lily—takes two minutes to make it to the bathroom. By then, however, her movements are more fluid, as if all Not-Lily needed was a little practice. Lily’s mind screams, but her consciousness is like a spectator in the second balcony of a badly lit theatre, the stage faraway, the characters Lilliputian.

Pawing open the medicine chest, her fingers walk over bottles. Pills, lots of pills: Darvocet, Vicodin, OxyContin. And Mackie’s works: two syringes, two halves of a Coca-Cola can, cotton balls for straining heroin, a lighter because discards are way too easy for the cops to match up to a pack. Mackie’s knife, the one he uses on the cans. For an old guy—has to be sixty, if he’s a day—he really goes through this stuff. He explained it once: Spoons are probable cause, but Coke, anyone can have a Coke can, for Christ’s sake, this is America.

Pills. Jesus, but Lily wants pills. Pills make things hazy, so she doesn’t care so much.

Mother

Who?

likes uppers. Feed a girl enough, she works for hours. And men will pay a lot of money for the young ones, especially the virgins. Virgins are good luck. They will cure a man of AIDS. Mother once knew a doctor in Poipet who could make virgins, over and over again. Doctors will do anything for enough money.

Not-Lily’s fingers twitch, flex, grab the knife. The blade locks into place with that sweet, metallic snick.

She says his name three, four times before he rolls over. Mackie’s fat, he’s a pig. Too much beer and Thai takeout, and the grease they use in those spring rolls’ll kill ya if the MSG don’t. His belly jiggles like quick-silver in the light of the dead channel.

“What the fuh?” He scrubs eye grit with the balls of his fists, an oddly childlike gesture. “What you want, bitch?”

“I’m not a bitch,” she whispers, the Lily piece of her mind finally realizing what is coming next, and, God forgive her, she wants it. She’s even happy because this is revenge, a sort of stand.

“But I’m not Lily.” And she brings the knife down. “I’m not.”

She doesn’t know if, through his screams, he hears. Certainly, in a little while, he’s past caring.

II

I was dead asleep when my pager brrred at one A.M. Technically, I was supposed to be at the station for third shift, but plenty of guys took calls from home. Not that I was home, mind you.

On these odd Fridays, I was sure my colleagues in homicide didn’t know what to make of me. I can guarantee you that the Black Hats at the synagogue—in Fairfax, off Route 236—thought my presence among them pretty weird. Me, too. Most days, I didn’t understand why I chose to study with the rabbi or occasionally come for a Sabbath meal and good conversation.

We’d met years ago on a murder I and Adam—my best friend, my partner—caught. Later, he’d tried to help Adam. Couldn’t, and Adam died. I don’t know if he thought he was helping me now.

Mostly, I was the student. I listened. I asked questions, very pointed ones, mostly about Kabbalist mysticism. The rabbi had interpreted a spell left at the scene of that case, so he knew his stuff. Not like Madonna-kitsch. Oh, sure, Kabbalah was magic, just as the mezuzah tacked to virtually every doorway in the rabbi’s house was an amulet. But Judaism was pretty specific: Suffer not a witch to live. Exodus 22, verse 18.

But. That’s different from saying magic doesn’t exist.

And Judaism has its protective spells and amulets. Every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has magical connotations. Name-magic, some of it. Heck, even Solomon bound demons to build the First Temple.

So we talked. Sometimes, we drank bad coffee, but only if his secretary was in that day.

I crept downstairs, guided by nightlights. The lights were on timers, as was the oven, the compressor on the refrigerator. The refrigerator light bulb was unscrewed. How Orthodox Jews made do before the invention of the automatic coffeemaker, I’ll never know.

Halfway down the stairs, though, I caught the unmistakable aroma of fresh coffee. Hunh. Turned the corner. “Rabbi, what are you doing?”

Dietterich shrugged. He was a bearish man, with a thick tangle of brown beard that was showing more threads of silver these days. In his black robe and slippers, he looked like someone’s scruffy, huggable uncle.

“I had … a dream. Don’t ask me what. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep, and I heard you moving around, so …” Another shrug. “You’ll need coffee.”

“You turned on the coffeemaker. Isn’t that forbidden?”

“Pikuach nefesh.” Dietterich was a native New Yorker. Every time he opened his mouth, I thought Shea Stadium. “ ‘Neither shall you stand by the blood of your neighbor.’ From Leviticus. To save a human life supersedes all other commands.”

“Well, they usually call me when it’s too late.”

He handed me a travel mug. He did think ahead. “But when you catch a killer, he can’t kill again, right? It evens out.”

The coffee was hot and smooth going down. Clearly he hadn’t taken lessons from his secretary. This was a bigger relief than you can imagine. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Think of this as an advance, a down payment. Save one life, it’s as if you saved the world. Making coffee so you don’t end up wrapped around a tree seems a no-brainer.”

“What about the Guy Upstairs?” For the record, I wasn’t sure where I stood on the God thing, but I can tell you this: I’ve seen what evil does, and I have no trouble bringing evil down. I’m not wrath of God about it. It’s what I do.

“Hashem can take a joke.” Dietterich hesitated, then said, “Jason, why do you come here? Don’t misunderstand me. We’re friends. But, in you, there is something missing. Here.” His bunched fist touched his chest. “You’re a detective, a seeker. You strive toward light where others see only darkness. But I still think you are a little bit like my hand here. You need to open, just a little.” His fist relaxed. “Like opening a door to a second sight. You can’t hold anything in your mind unless you open your heart.”

I don’t know how I felt. Not embarrassed. More like I’d been filleted and gutted.

He read my face. “I’m sorry. I’m intruding.”

“No. Don’t apologize. A lot of the time I’m stumbling around in the shadows.”

“Then do something about it.” He moved a little closer and pulled something out of a pocket of his robe. A glint of metal, a sparkle. “I don’t know why I haven’t given this to you before now. But now … feels right.”

The metal was like nothing I’d seen. In fact, my mind must’ve been playing tricks because the light was very poor. The metal wasn’t smooth but woven: gold filaments, I thought, and maybe silver? A hint of blue in the weave. I made out a five-by-five grid. A different gem sparkled in every square, both illuminating and magnifying a strange character—were they letters?—incised in the metal beneath. I counted five different symbols. Two were like runes, but the other three looked more like crude Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The center square was unique, with a character repeated nowhere else in the grid: a squashed teardrop canted right, tip down, broader bottom adorned with inwardly curved hooks or prongs. I thought: Georgia O’Keeffe. I rubbed my thumb over the gem there. A glitter of purple. Amethyst? “What is this?”

He opened his mouth, but my pager brrred again, and too late, I remembered I hadn’t called in yet. “Sorry, I have to take this. I didn’t want to use the phone in the house. But thank you.” I slipped the charm into my trouser pocket. “And don’t be sorry.”

“It’s fine, fine. We’ll talk later.” He made a shooing motion. “Go. Save the world.”

The crime scene guys had finished with pictures and were working the room. Kay Howard, the deputy M.E., was hunkered over the body. My partner, Rollins, was downstairs talking to the night clerk, a diminutive Indian with coke-bottle glasses and an accent that got thicker the more questions we asked.

I waited, resisting the urge to crowd Kay, something that comes easy when you’re as big as I am. People say I look like Patrick Ewing, except Ewing has the beard, and I’m two inches shorter and about eighty billion bucks poorer. I saw an opening when Kay bagged the hands. “Anything?”

“Well, she went right for the eyes.” Her gloved finger traced a bloody orbit. “Very clean, no ragged edges, no evidence that she hesitated at all. She got him a good shot on the right.” Kay gestured toward the evidence bag with a black-handled, blood-soaked pocketknife. The blade was serrated along two thirds of its length, then tapered to a sharp, slightly upturned point. A quarter inch was missing from the tip.

“We’ll probably find the tip somewhere in the brain, or maybe wedged in the sphenoid at the back of the orbit, but that’s not what killed him.” Kay indicated a deep, ragged, fleshy necklace extending from MacAndrews’s right to his left ear. Congealing purple blood sheeted the dead man’s chest and there were drippy arcs painted on the wall immediately above the headboard. A slowly coagulating river of purple-black sludge stained his forearms, though I could just make out what looked like a tattoo on his left bicep. (Or it could’ve been a cockroach. If his toenail fungus was any indication, personal hygiene wasn’t among MacAndrews’s finer qualities.) “She got both the arteries and didn’t stop. Sawed right through the trachea.” She looked up, and I saw a glint of steel in her eyes, a little defiance. “If it wasn’t so politically incorrect, I’d say good riddance.”

“The guy was an asswipe pimp. Won’t hear me disagree.”

“I did not hear that,” said the tech. He was fiddling with the DVD player. “I’m not even in the room, and if I am in the room, I’ve turned off my hearing aid.” His tone changed. “Whoa, we got a DVD here.”

“So let’s see what our bad boy here was watching,” I said.

The film was clearly homemade but grainy, as if it might be a transfer from a VCR tape. It felt … old.

The room could’ve been anywhere, and the camera stayed tight on a single bed with a dirty brown blanket and a single pillow. No pillowcase. Nothing on the walls I could see right off the bat, though there might have been something on the corner of a night table protruding into the frame. Cigarette pack? And something green and white on the bed, near the pillow. Something else propped alongside. No sound.

A girl lay over the blanket, her head propped on the pillow. Ten, maybe twelve years old. She was Asian, with long black hair scraped back in a ponytail. She was naked and when she moved, she did so sluggishly as if moving through water. Drugged.

The man was also naked except for the black ski mask. There might have been something on his right ass cheek—a large mole, maybe—but I couldn’t be sure. He loomed over the bed, then turned and flashed a V. Then he reached to his right, somewhere off-camera.

When his hand came back, I saw the tongue of a clear plastic bag in his fist.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said the tech.

Kay let go of a small, sick gasp. “God.”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew: God had as much to do with it as the Tooth Fairy.

It took perhaps eight or ten horrible minutes, and that was only because he didn’t flip her onto her stomach and tighten the plastic bag until the very end. Even then, he prolonged the moment, teasing her, rolling the plastic away from her gaping mouth so she might gulp a precious breath or two before cinching the bag tight once more.

Kay was crying. The color was gone from the tech’s face. I was dry-eyed and shaking, my guts in knots, a black rage blooming in my chest.

Made me want to make an arrest somewhere dark and faraway. Maybe have a little accident, or something.

Something.

III

Jane Doe, mute and catatonic, had been taken to George Washington University Hospital.

The ER was hopping, so the bars must’ve closed. In the waiting room, the air smelled like dirty socks, musty and close; there was a motley assortment of frightened relatives, squalling kids with dead-tired moms in do-rags, the odd broken arm or leg.

In back, I waited behind the nurses’ station. Nothing really going tonight. An MVA in one trauma bay: a weeping young blonde girl in a neck brace and torn blue jeans. A couple of heart attacks—that high mosquito whine of defibrillators charging, someone bawling, “Clear!”

One big moose with steely Old Testament prophet hair and a scruff of white beard. A Sixties throwback: black leather jacket with matching leather chaps, boots, aviator sunglasses in a breast pocket. He was Bay 4, very drunk, very busy bleeding all over his Grateful Dead t-shirt and loudly harassing an earnest-looking female medical student, yelling that he’d taken worse in ’Nam and just needed a “goddamned needle …”

Across from Jerry Garcia’s stunt double, I spotted an Asian family. Two women in their, oh, forties, fifties and one middle-aged guy clustered around a gurney. A shriveled, skeletal-looking guy with sickly yellow skin lay motionless as a mummy, tucked beneath a sheet. His bald head was cadaverous, the skin stretched tight across his skull. His black eyes were dull, fixed. Not just old. Ancient. There were blue-black sooty smudges on his forearms and several more on his neck.

Hmmm. In a fire, maybe?

Maybe it was because they were Asian, and I’d just seen that damn film. To this day, I don’t know why they drew my attention. Now very curious, I tossed a glance at the whiteboard. which listed, in blue felt marker, each bay by problem.

Jerry Garcia was in 4: ETOH, lac. Doctorese for a drunk done busted his head.

My Jane Doe was in Bay 8: ?Sz. ? Head trauma Neuro. Little red dot signifying she was a police case. As if the shiny black shoes visible beneath the drawn curtain weren’t the uniform assigned to keep tabs on my suspect, and her being cuffed to the gurney wasn’t like, you know, a giveaway.

The Asian family occupied Bay 7: Ψ.

Psychiatry. Hmmm.

“Detective Saunders?” A squat, utterly humorless doctor with gimlet, pewter-gray eyes and pale, nearly translucent lips stuck out his hand. The words Phillip Gerber, M.D. and Neurology were stitched in blue above the left breast pocket of his white doctor’s coat. Ten to one, no one called him Phil. “Dr. Gerber. I’m the neurologist on the case.” Just in case I couldn’t read.

Gerber’s palm was soft. Like shaking hands with a grub. “So what can you tell me about our Jane Doe?” I asked, taking back my hand.

“Well, she’s no longer mute, for starters. Her name’s Lily Hopkins. Don’t have an age or place of residence, but we’re running her through the NCMEC, but that’s only good if she’s been reported missing.”

“She’s responsive? Can I speak with her?”

“Yes, in a moment.” He’d fingered up a chart and was now flipping pages. “Her neurological examination is unremarkable. Blood work was negative except for some alcohol in her system …”

I waited while he droned through the negatives. In Bay 4, I saw the medical student twitch a curtain around Jerry Garcia’s gurney. She was pissed but trying to look as though getting cussed out by a drunken, bloody Sixties throwback was something you just took in stride. Her eyes briefly flicked my way. Lingered a sec, a sparrow of some emotion flitting across her face. I raised my eyebrows in my best yeah, you really got an asshole there expression. She got that. The corner of her mouth twitched in a tiny smirk as she slid behind the nurses’ station, wrote Surg and Ψ on the whiteboard, then sat with the chart about two chairs down from where I stood with Gerber.

When Gerber came up for air, I said, “So you’re thinking … ?”

He didn’t look pleased at being derailed. Good. “I’ll be honest, Detective. For the record, I’m not a fan of psychiatric diagnoses, though I’m no expert. They’re only descriptive, not etiological. Having said that … You’re familiar with multiple personality?”

“A little.”

He stared at me a moment. “Well, you took that in stride. Mention DID to a detective or lawyer, and they roll their eyes.”

I chose my words carefully. “I’ve seen a few things. Is she a multiple?”

Gerber’s lips thinned to a paper cut above his chin. “Personally, I think Dissociative Identity Disorder is ludicrous. But, no … Ms. Hopkins is not a multiple. She doesn’t claim to have alters. I don’t know about her past, but trauma in and of itself does not induce dissociative phenomenon.”

Over Gerber’s head Jerry Garcia hove into view, swaying. He’d changed into one of those flimsy hospital gowns. A wide gauze wrap stained with rust was wrapped around his scalp like a bandana. He listed, pulling hard to port, tacking for the wall to hold himself up.

I said to Gerber, “So what are you saying?”

To my right, a slender doctor rounded the corner behind the nurses’ station and touched the medical student’s shoulder. I laid odds she was the shrink. Just … something about her, the way she carried herself like an eye of calm in the center of a hurricane. Self-possessed. Confident.

She was also stunning: a long graceful neck, auburn hair she wore in a French knot, green eyes. Heart-shaped face exaggerated by a widow’s peak.

Her name was embroidered in blue thread above the left breast pocket: Sarah Wylde, M.D. Below that: Psychiatry.

Wylde. A little ding in the back of my brain. That name …

As soon as I saw the two women together, I knew: sisters. And maybe she felt my gaze because she did the same thing her sister had. Her eyes touched on my face—and lingered there.

A tiny jolt of … recognition.

In my pocket, a strange heat. Puzzled over that a second and then remembered: that charm. What … ? I trailed my hand over the metal. It was warm, the gems almost pulsing, as if keeping time with a hidden heart.

What?

Gerber was saying, “The EEG findings are clear.”

I wrenched my attention back to Gerber. “Clear?”

“Yes, you can’t fake an EE—”

“Hey.” Garcia bawled. Then louder: “Hey! You!” Gerber looked over his shoulder. The usual bustle quieted as people paused.

The student pushed to her feet. “Mr. Dickert, if you wouldn’t mind …”

“Fuck you say.” Dickert was out of the bay now, maybe twenty feet into the ER. The student started forward, but her sister smoothly interposed herself between the two.

“Mr. Dickert,” she said. “I’m Dr. Wylde. Can we speak for a few moments?”

Dickert’s eyes jerked to her face, and then they got buggy. An expression that was equal parts horror and rage contorted his features. “No.” He took a step back, swaying, and pointed with a finger that shook badly enough to be visible from where I was. “You, you stay away from me.”

Wylde advanced slowly. “I’m sure we …”

“Gook.” Saliva foamed on Dickert’s lips. “You’re a fucking gook.” Then he seemed to see the Asian family for the first time. “Fuck you staring at?”

“Hey.” I stepped around Gerber. I saw the curtain to Bay 8, Hopkins’ bay, move as the uniform poked her head out to see what was going on.

“Please, Detective.” (How did she know?) Dr. Wylde held up a hand but didn’t turn around. “I can handle …”

That’s as far as she got, but I saw it coming. “Doc!”

A fraction of a second too late.

With a ferocious bellow, Dickert launched himself at Wylde. He was on her in a second, his fist crashing into her jaw.

Her sister screamed. “Sarah!”

Wylde tottered, but he’d wrapped her up, an arm clamped round her throat in a stranglehold. “This is a fucking trap! You’re all gooks! You think you can fool me? You’re not smart enough, Charlie. You can’t fool me!”

“Sarah!” The student started for her sister. “Sarah!”

Pandemonium now: a nurse jabbering into a phone, two security guards muscling their way through, the uniform drawing her service weapon.

“Holster your weapon!” I shouted. The last thing we needed was gunfire. “Now!”

“Gook cunt!” Dickert had a hand clamped around both Wylde’s wrists. Whirling her around, screaming, spit flying—and then his voice changed, went guttural: “Be gone until I com …”

Without warning, his head jerked, a whiplash snap, and then he was staggering back one step, two. Blood spurted from his nose, and he dropped.

In my pocket, the charm heated. And that’s when I saw it, or maybe it was a trick of the light. But in the space between the two—between Dickert and Wylde—the air danced. It quivered, rippling like the surface of an ocean breaking apart.

What sprouted from Wylde’s body was white then black. Cohering in a roiling ball of vapor, it verged on the brink of solidity. Of reality.

And then in my head: Not yet time.

I didn’t stop, didn’t think what that meant.

“Dr. Wylde!” Closing the distance, I grabbed her by the arm and yanked, hard. A queer electric thrill, like a charge jumping from a Van de Graaff, cracked, but I hung on. “Wylde!”

Either I’d broken her concentration, or she—it—was done.

Or I was nuts because nobody said anything like Hey, you see that? Or Jesus, she’s a witch!

And ten to one, they weren’t hearing voices, either.

The air pruned. Whatever that thing had been—it vanished.

On the floor, Dickert drew in a wheezy, rattling breath. His nose was streaming blood.

Wylde turned. And then, for the briefest of moments, Sarah Wylde was not … all there.

Superimposed upon her body, like the ephemeral penumbra of a darkened sun, was the smeary translucent avatar of the girl from the DVD. The girl’s imago drew in upon itself, folding into Wylde’s body until she was gone.

And then it was just Sarah Wylde, her brilliant green eyes firing to emeralds.

“I’m not a gook,” she said, reasonably. I saw where Dickert had split her lip. Blood dyed her teeth orange. Her eyes rolled. “Devaputra-mara.”

I caught her before she hit the floor.

Later, when I remembered, I drew the charm from my pocket. But it was just a pretty piece with weird symbols and gemstones, and cold.

IV

“… What you’d expect after extensive blood loss,” Kay was saying. “Official cause of death is cerebral anoxia secondary to exsanguination.”

“No surprises there.” I stood beneath the ER’s breezeway off Washington Circle. Freezing my ass off, but you can’t use a cell in a hospital. Messes up the machinery. The sun had staggered up to lighten the clouds to pewter, and the traffic was picking up. “Anything else?”

“Just interesting: MacAndrews served in Vietnam. Army, Third Brigade. He even had this funky tattoo on his bicep. Rollins could run down his service record if you want.”

“And that’s interesting … how?” But then I answered my own question. “The DVD.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

Hunh. The disk was being looked at by the computer guy to see if he could clean things up. “Kay, you at your computer? Can you Google …” I spelled the name. “Check for family.”

She was silent a moment. Then: “Don’t tell me Preston Wylde’s involved.”

“I don’t know yet. What’d you get?”

“Hang on.” Sound of typing. “Lot of hits, but … here we go. Just says that he’s got two daughters. No wife mentioned. No names.”

That tallied. Guys like Preston Wylde might not want too much personal information out there. “Try Sarah. Same last name.”

More typing. “Hunh. Well, this is interesting. She comes up as faculty at the medical school. Her specialty is transcultural psychiatry. She’s been all over, most recently a couple of years in Thailand and Cambodia researching cacodemonomania …”

I thought of that Asian family. That Ψ. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’m a pathologist. Hang on … hunh.”

“You keep doing that.”

“Well, that’s because it’s hunh. Cacodemonomania is the delusion of being possessed by a demon.”

This time I was quiet. My mind jumped to something that most cops would find well-nigh certifiable. Maybe if I’d been more open to possibilities, though, Adam might still be alive.

See, I’d investigated an angel.

It was complicated.

And I know what I heard out of Dickert’s mouth. And what Sarah Wylde said … “Anything else?”

“Well, there’s a pretty funky paper entitled ‘Green is for Goblin: Exorcism in Buddhist Magic.’ ”

I closed my eyes—and saw Wylde’s own glittering, emerald eyes.

Kay: “Is there something you’re looking for in particular?”

Yeah. Try Googling Wylde and witch and Satan . “I don’t know. That’s okay. Thanks, Kay.” I disconnected, then dialed Rollins. He answered and I heard background noise: men’s voices. A phone ringing. “Where are you?”

“In the office, finishing paper. I hate paper. What’s up?”

I filled him in, then said, “Run Dickert through the system, see if you get anything.”

“And he’s connected … ? You’ll notice the ellipsis.”

“Well, he’s an asshole.”

“The world’s full of them.”

“So I’m betting there’s something.”

“And it connects … ?”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“So observant. You must be a detective.”

“So will you run him?”

“Okay, okay. What about our case?”

“I still haven’t had a chance to talk to the girl. I was going to interview her now.”

“Wait for me. Give me twenty minutes.”

“This is Washington.”

“Forty.”

“That’ll do.” I closed the phone and ducked back into the ER.

Things had more or less gotten back to normal except Gerber was nowhere in sight and Dickert was in leather restraints, snoring from whatever he’d been given. Someone had also taken soap and water to him. Didn’t really improve his looks. A walrus in a flimsy hospital gown that had hiked up in unfortunate places. Obligatory biker tattoos: a ring of barbed wire around his left bicep that, with gravity and a couple years, would end up a bracelet; an American flag on the right. He had a thing about skulls: skull on fire, Jolly Roger centered in an ace of spades peeping from an ass cheek (too much information!), Grateful Dead skull haloed with red roses.

I hoped Wylde pressed charges. There was just something about Dickert I didn’t like, and it wasn’t about the t-shirt or that he was a drunk and a bully. His tattoos were unoriginal, but you couldn’t throw a guy in jail for his taste in tattoos.

Just … something. That voice, for starters.

And the one in my head …

Oh, don’t go there. I’d just about convinced myself the whole thing was stress.

The medical student sat on a stool next to a surgical resident who was stitching Dickert’s scalp back together. “Your sister around?” I asked the student.

If she was surprised that I’d put it together, she didn’t show it. “Zoe,” she said, and stuck out her hand. We shook; her grip was firm. “Sarah’s with the Chouns.” Zoe tilted her head toward the bay where the Asian family was hidden behind a drawn curtain. “She might be a while. They’re family friends.”

“She okay?”

“Sure. I don’t think she’s going to press charges, though.”

“That’s a shame. And here I was hoping.”

“The guy had an idiosyncratic reaction to alcohol. It happens. Once their BAL goes down, they’re pretty reasonable people. Well … maybe not him.”

“Your sister always take risks?”

“Yes,” the surgical resident said, without turning around. “Rushing in where angels fear to tread. Can’t tell Sarah anything and never could, if you listen to the attendings. On the other hand, can’t tell Zoe anything either. I pity the chief resident of whatever specialty she ends up in.”

“A fan club,” I said to Zoe.

“Part of the family charm. We go all sorts of places.” She mock-punched the resident. “Harry’s just worried that I’ll end up his intern for his first big case.”

“Are you kidding?” Harry tied off, snipped. “When that day comes, and if you’re very, very good, I’ll let you staple the skin.”

“So generous.”

I debated a half second about waiting for Wylde—to ask her … what? Hey, whoa, nifty parlor trick. Do all the witches in your coven do that? But then I spotted Rollins trundling in, and I really did have work.

“Hey,” Rollins said. He was open faced and big in a solid, apple pie, Midwest kind of way. Last person in the world you’d peg as a computer geek. “Computer guy thinks he might have something. I’d have given it a shot, but I was doing paper.”

“My, my, everyone is working hard and on a Saturday morning. What’s the story on Dickert?”

Rollins fished out some flavor of PDA and started tapping. “Mostly small stuff. Couple DUIs. A breaking and entering kicked down to illegal trespass, along with two assault charges. All three were in connection with a girlfriend. Charges were dropped after the girlfriend didn’t show to testify. Got an address out in Springfield, and a couple rental properties in Arlington. Looks like that’s how he makes a living, renting out the houses and general all-around handyman.”

Odd he lived out there, given his reaction to the Chouns. Route 50 near I-495 was wall-to-wall Korean, Vietnamese, Thai. “What about military? He said he’s a vet. Well, implied.”

“Drafted in ’65, did two tours. Army. Third Brigade, Twenty-fifth Infantry Division.”

Hmmm. “Two tours? He volunteered?”

“Dunno. Honorable discharge in ’69 and then nothing until the DUIs start up. You’re looking for … ?”

“Nothing.” I let it go. Dickert was trouble, but a brigade was a big place, and I had plenty to deal with.

Lily Hopkins looked very young and very scared. A trace of baby fat under her chin. Maybe thirteen. But there also were purple smudges in the hollows of her cheeks and beneath her eyes, and she had that kind of haunted, hunted look you saw in runaways.

“I don’t know what happened. I just … it was like I was dreaming. Only I couldn’t move at first. I almost couldn’t breathe. Like someone sitting on my chest. Then it was kind of like … You know how you get in a crowded room and people are shoving you and shoving you? That’s what it was like. I got shoved aside.” A quick flick of her eyes to my face and then away. “There was somebody else.”

“Somebody. Not something?”

Shake of the head. “A girl. She talked about her mother and an aunt.”

“You heard a voice?”

Really hesitant now. “N-nooo. Know how you hear your own voice in your head sometimes? When you’re reading? Like that. Her voice but not really talking to me. I don’t think she was American.”

Rollins and I looked at each other. “How do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, she didn’t sound American. Like she thought about this guy. I think he was … you know, she … was doing what Mackie made me do. Only either his name was like a joke in her head or she really didn’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“In my head, she said he was Call-Me-Bob. You know, the old joke. Guy shakes your hand and you say, ‘Lily’ and he says, ‘Call me Bob.’ Like that. And she mentioned a place named Poy … Polypett or something, and said a bunch of words … yama and mutra … stuff I didn’t get.”

I snagged on mutra. Like Wylde … “Tell me the rest.”

She did. It gave me a little chill, the way she described a presence residing in her mind, watching, waiting. Of being yanked around like a doll and commanded to do a horrible thing.

I couldn’t help but think of Wylde.

I expected to see Gerber waiting when Rollins and I pushed through the curtain. But he wasn’t.

“Detective Saunders?” Dr. Wylde offered her hand. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you properly.”

I liked her grip: firm but not overly so. I introduced Rollins, then asked, “How’s the lip?” Actually I could see how the lip was: swollen.

She touched the knot with slender fingers. “I think the plastic surgeons were disappointed. My dignity’s hurt more than anything else. We usually don’t have situations like that get so out of hand here. Anyway.” She held up a chart. “Ms. Hopkins has been transferred to the psychiatry service for evaluation. Dr. Gerber will consult, if needed. He said that he hadn’t had a chance to go over the EEG results with you. So.”

We followed her to the nurses’ station. A quick glance at Dickert’s bay—empty now, I saw. Ten to one, his ample butt was parked on his Harley. Ten to one, he didn’t use a helmet.

Good. The world needs more organ donors.

Wylde flipped pages. “Okay, here are the EEG findings.”

A lot of scratchy scribbles. “What am I looking at?”

“We do a routine run to get a baseline, and then we introduce various types of stimulation to evoke a response. For example, here, you see normal brain activity and then, with photic stimulation—light—there’s activity in the occipital lobe, where visual information is processed.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, everything’s going fine, with no abnormalities until … right … here.” She stretched past to point with a pen, and I saw the vivid scroll of a tattoo at her right wrist, a weird line of script.

Angelina Jolie.

What?

Before I could figure out what my brain was trying to tell me, she rolled on: “Time index is plus thirty minutes. Where the waves are faster, closer together? That’s called beta rhythm. You see beta in REM sleep, when we dream. But she wasn’t asleep at the time. This rhythm just appeared.”

“Was she having a seizure?”

“No. If she’d been asleep and then awakened, I would’ve said sleep paralysis. In REM sleep, we’re all partially paralyzed. It’s called REM atonia. Perfectly normal. In sleep paralysis, the subject awakens, but the paralysis persists. Many subjects experience quite vivid hallucinations. In some cases, sleep paralysis will transition to what we call lucid dreaming. For all intents and purposes, the person is conscious, but the brain is still in REM sleep. If you listen to Lily, she was in deep sleep, and then she awakened, convinced there was someone else in her mind. This EEG records REM breakthrough into the conscious state, which you might interpret as a lucid dream. But I don’t think so. Here, it’s as if there are two brains. Two people. One’s Ms. Hopkins,” she indicated a set of tracings, “and the other’s not. Like a split brain: two completely independent patterns, but her CT is stone-cold normal.”

“Was she aware of it when this happened?”

“Yes. She said someone else came in.” Wylde paused. “Not-Lily was how she put it.”

“Is she … ?”

“Crazy? No.”

I said nothing. My eyes dropped to the EEG again, those two independent brains occupying the same space at the same time. Then my eyes snagged on the initials on the front sheet. One set was P.G.: Phillip Gerber.

The other: S.W.

She said someone else came in.

I said, “When did you come into the EEG suite, Doctor?”

Rollins said, “What?”

Her expression was unreadable, though I saw her pulse bounding in her neck. She opened her mouth to reply, but Rollins’s pager chirped. “Computer guy,” he said, heading for the exit. “I’ll let him know we’re on our way.”

I waited until Rollins had gone and then looked back at Wylde. Just came out with it. “You’re Preston Wylde’s daughter.”

“It is an uncommon last name. My father’s always tried to maintain a distance between his professional life and home, but …” She shook her head. “Things have a way of coming to roost.”

An odd statement. I let it hang.

She said, “Is the fact that my father works for the FBI a problem?”

“No. But I can’t imagine it’s easy being the daughter of a famous profiler, especially given the men your father tracks down.”

“Demon hunter is what the press prefers.”

“I don’t get anything near that sexy when the press talks about me.”

“Maybe you need to get sexier then.” She checked her watch. “I have to go. Was there anything else?”

“Yes. What was that, Doctor? With Dickert? And don’t tell me nothing. I know what I saw, damn it.”

Her face was still as smooth glass. “What do you believe happened, Detective? What do you think you saw?”

Not what, who . And I believe you stopped him somehow. I believe you command things the rest of us only have nightmares about.

And does it have anything to do with what’s happening to me ?

When I still said nothing, only then did her expression shift: a tiny blur, as if she were a projection going briefly out of focus, the pixels scattering, then coalescing around the edges until she was sharp edged, like something scissored out of black paper and superimposed upon a perfectly white background. She was almost too real.

“I’ve got work.” She turned to leave.

For no reason I could think of, I said, “Dr. Wylde, how is the old man? Mr. Choun?”

Her back stiffened just the tiniest bit, and when she turned her face was midway to rearranging itself into something close to neutrality. But I saw the emotions chase through—and there was grief, most of all.

“He’s about to give up the ghost,” she said.

“That’s an odd way of putting it, Doctor.”

“I guess it depends on your point of view. One thing, Detective, about my father? What they call him?”

This was not what I expected. “Yes?”

“Sometimes, a name isn’t all about sex. Sometimes, Detective, the truth is right under your nose.”

V

“I’ve been able to clean up the image pretty good,” said the computer guy. “Best I can tell, this is old stock film transferred to three-quarter inch and then to disk. A lot of degradation in the transfer. Black and white, silent. Almost looks like newsreel footage, you know what I’m saying?”

Black and white? I could’ve sworn I saw colors: the dirty brown of that bedspread, that girl’s black hair. The blood where she’d bitten her tongue. That green and white thing on the bed. “Let’s see it.”

The thing was no easier to watch the second time around. But the computer guy had been right: black and white.

Hunh. “Can you tell us anything about where and when?”

“Yup.” The computer guy tapped keys. “I’ve isolated a couple items in the room, did freeze-frame, blew ’em up.”

What he brought up were two stills of objects on the bed: one, a triangle protruding into the frame from the right, and the packet alongside the pillow, only black and white now instead of green and white. He zoomed in on the latter with a couple of mouse clicks.

I stared for a few seconds. “Chiclets?”

“Chewing gum?” said Rollins.

“But a very special pack of chewing gum. It’s only two pieces, and what store sells that? Then this other thing.” He did the zoom thing again, and I now could see that the triangle was the bottom third of a box.

I said, “Does that say what I think it does?”

“It does indeed.”

First line: Marl

Second line: 4 CLASS A CIGARE

“Who sells cigarettes with only four smokes a pack?” Rollins asked.

I thought I knew.

The computer guy looked smug. “Before I get to that, there’s one more thing. This is from the guy. That splotch there?”

“Yeah, I thought that was a mole,” I said.

“Not a mole. Let me just enlarge it here … clean it up … there.”

My whole insides went still.

Not a mole. A tattoo. One I recognized.

An ace of spades with a Jolly Roger in the center.

The computer guy said, “The gum and the cigarettes were standard C rations for American soldiers. That tattoo is a copy of a death card, what PsyOps developed during Vietnam and which some soldiers used to leave on the bodies of dead Viet Cong. Here.” More mouse clicks, and this time a webpage came up with a screen, the kind on YouTube. “This is actual footage of something called Operation Baker. Happened in 1967.”

About ten minutes long, the film was silent and consisted mainly of soldiers on patrol, burning a village. Then, at the end, footage of American soldiers putting cards in the mouths of dead Vietnamese.

“Ace of spades,” Rollins said. “Looks like a regular card from a Bicycle pack.”

The computer guy nodded. “Some lieutenant got wind that the ace of spades was some kind of bad luck symbol to the Vietnamese or something. He was wrong, but he contacted Bicycle, and they sent over thousands of packs. Said Secret Weapon right on the pack. Not all units used the same cards, though, and some designs were more popular than others.”

“You know what company that was?” I asked. “In the film?”

“Yeah. Third Brigade. Twenty-fifth Infantry Division.”

“Dickert,” said Rollins.

“And MacAndrews.” Opening my phone, pressing speed dial.

When I got Kay on the line, I said, “MacAndrews … did he have any identifying marks?”

He did.

Thirty minutes later, Rollins was still tapping keys and frowning. “Can’t you go any faster?” I asked.

“Learn to use the damn computer,” Rollins said, though he didn’t sound mad. It was a partner schtick. Just as Adam and I’d had ours. “Okay, it says here that Jolie has several tattoos.”

“Go to Google Images. I want to see them.”

“You want to drive?”

“I like watching you earn your pay.” Pictures winked onto the screen. Obscure tribal signs, a huge tiger on her back, several dragons, a large cross. “The woman’s a walking billboard … There, on her left shoulder blade. What is that?”

“Supposedly, a magical tattoo,” Rollins said, and read. “Says here it’s written in Khmer and is supposed to protect her and her loved ones from bad luck, evil, stuff like that. It’s a … yantra tattoo.”

Bingo. “That’s it, that’s what she’s got.”

“Who?”

“Tell me about yantra tattoos.”

“Jesus, you’re demanding. Hold on, hold on …” A lot of hits on Google. Silence as we read.

Then Rollins said, “This is some funky shit.”

Here was how it worked.

A yantra tattoo had to both adhere to a certain Sanskrit pattern—the yantra—and be coupled with precise muons, chants dating back to the Vedic religion, the historical predecessor of Hinduism, which the monk who applied the tattoo was to recite.

A monk. That old man, Chuon. And those smudges on his forearms and neck: They’d been tattoos.

The actual verses tattooed in special ink were in Pali, the religious language of the earliest Buddhist school, Thervada, or “The Way of the Elders.”

If you believed these things actually worked, there were patterns that might make a warrior stronger, give someone good luck, allow someone to become invisible. Give you superstrength. If you believed in magic.

I thought Sarah Wylde might.

And me? Well.

I had met an angel a year ago. Maybe I was due a visit from the other side.

And I found out one more thing, courtesy of one of Wylde’s papers.

In Cambodia, sleep paralysis has a very specific name: khmaoch sângkât.

Translation: The ghost knocks you down.

Because the people who suffer from this also report seeing demons that hold them down. Another paper suggested that the symptoms were really PTSD; one woman suffered an episode whenever she remembered how soldiers razed her village and killed everyone.

I don’t think it was either-or. Could be both. Could be, maybe, that the old monk had been carrying the girl on the DVD. And maybe now, Sarah Wylde was picking up the slack.

Like she said: Right under my nose.

VI

Wylde wasn’t at GW.

“This is nuts.” Rollins was driving fast, no flasher, the light fading and the day slipping away. Flakes beginning to fly. “We’re driving a million miles an hour to intercept someone you’re not even sure will be there so we can deal with a murder that’s over forty years old in a country we’re not by two guys—”

“Maybe just one. Maybe two of them, or even more. And this isn’t about just the past. Remember what Lily said: The girl in her head had a red dress. There was the TV news saying snow in Washington.”

“So you’re saying—”

“We know Mackie was a pimp, and we know that Dickert’s got rental properties in Arlington, right? So maybe he’s renting to himself. Maybe what he’s got are a whole bunch of little girls just like Lily, only they’re Asian.”

“Because that’s where they’d have started, when they were in Vietnam. I can’t believe I’m even thinking this. Jason, you’re taking the word of a kid who killed a guy and said the devil made her do it. Man, are you hearing yourself? How are we going to explain this? And it still won’t help Lily. She killed a guy. It’s out of our hands.”

But this was the right thing to do, I knew it. As soon as the idea set in my mind, the charm Dietterich had given me had begun to warm, heating the skin of my chest as soon as I slipped the cord around my neck.

Why was I wearing it? Beats me. Same reason I didn’t tell Rollins what I thought about Wylde.

We were racing down Route 50 now, the strip malls blurring, and then the traffic starting to pick up. Cars started creeping. At the first flake, everyone in Washington panics and crashes into each other out of sympathy.

Screw this. I stretched, reached into the glove compartment, reeled out the flasher and slapped it onto the hood. “No choice, just don’t use the siren. Go, go!”

It was like the Red Sea parting, cars scuttling right then left like headless chickens. Rollins swore, jinked the car. I hung onto the safety strap on my side as Rollins took a hard right, accelerating through the turn. “You know, it’d be real nice if you get us there in one piece.”

Rollins was grim. “I’ll get us there. Just hope it’s the right there.”

Dickert’s rentals were in Arlington, but his house was in Springfield, an older section of identical 1950s ranch houses near I-495. It was dark by the time we made it. Snow silting down. A meager puddle of silver light from a street lamp illuminated the front drive, but I knew it was Dickert’s place as soon as I laid eyes on a Harley in the driveway.

There were no lights. The house felt empty. I didn’t see a car—I had no idea what Wylde drove—but I did notice that the house backed on dense woods. Lake Accotink Park. “They’re not in there. But I think.” I pointed at the woods.

“How do you know that?”

“Just do.” I popped the car door.

“Damn it, Jason, wait up!” Rollins pushed out of the car as I started around the back of the house. He grabbed my arm. “You have no idea where you’re going. Let me call for some backup. Man, we’re not even on our own turf. We’re going to end up getting our asses fried.”

“You’re right. So you should stay here.” I pulled free before he could protest and started for the woods. “Call for backup, Justin. Cover your ass. Better yet, go to those rental houses and see what you turn up.”

“I don’t have probable cause.”

“Find a busted window.”

He stood there a second, then hissed after me: “Jason, you don’t even have a fucking flashlight!”

“I know,” I said, and then I plunged into the woods.

I didn’t have a flashlight because I didn’t need one.

Reeling out the charm on its black cord, I let it hang outside my clothing. It was white-hot now, though it didn’t burn. The gems glittered in brilliant colors and shone beams that lanced the night. Showing me the way.

And my path was clear. Monstrous gleaming prints, partly human but clawed, tearing up and trammeling the earth. Think of the way white glows under UV and that’s how they looked.

Just as I also knew that anyone looking at me would’ve seen only a dark silhouette and no light at all. The ability to see—my second sight—was coming from within.

That there was only one set of prints worried me. I was pretty sure the prints belonged to Dickert—or whatever lived inside. But where was Wylde?

I couldn’t believe my intuition about this was wrong. Although I hadn’t seen her car on the street. Maybe she wasn’t here at all.

So I’m finally cracking up. Well, that’s just great.

But, no, I felt something striding alongside in my mind, a presence. Adam?

In my mind: Hurry, Jason.

The voice was sexless. I couldn’t place it.

I moved swiftly, silently. Almost too quietly; I should be making all kinds of noise. But there was none, as if I skimmed the earth. Snow getting thicker. Ahead, I sensed a space opening up, and in the next moment I smelled water. Getting close to the lake.

Ahead, I heard a low basso rumble, the sound of a man’s voice—and then the higher tones of a girl. And I knew: I’d found Dickert. Heart hammering, I ducked into inkier shadows at the edge of a clearing.

In the center stood Dickert, naked in the glare of my second sight. He seemed, if anything, larger than I remembered, and his skin was shifting as his body rippled, changing colors before my eyes, going from pallid white to a deep cobalt that was almost black. His eyes reddened to fiery pits; slashing white fangs sprouted from fleshy, crimson lips; the skulls on his body grinned down—At a slip of a girl cringing on the ground in a pool of blood-red gown. Not the girl I’d glimpsed in Wylde; this was the one who’d inhabited Lily’s mind.

But where was Wylde?

The air was getting thick, gathering and bunching on itself, and now I heard the whisk of many voices swirling on eddies and currents that were not breezes but liquid and sullen, with the feel of fingers dragged through tar.

The realization flashed into my mind with all the immediacy of insight.

The clearing was a perfect circle. The perimeter thrilled in the air with a slight tang of ozone, and the hackles of my neck prickled.

An absurd thought, entirely my own: Like a force field.

Stupid. But I reached a hand, felt the jump and shock of electricity as the field reacted, puckering into knives of energy that burned seams into my palm. With a hiss of pain, I pulled back.

At the sound, Dickert—or whatever he was Devaputra-mara

pivoted. He didn’t even seem surprised. His eyes danced flames, and when he laughed, the sound burst inside my head like napalm. Pain hazed my vision, and I staggered, went down on one knee, then grunted when another white salvo exploded in my brain. Maybe Dickert said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the roaring in my head. Gasping, I pressed my palms against my skull to keep it from blowing apart.

The little girl shrieked, something pointed and piercing that was a stake through my heart.

Had to do something. My slack fingers slapped against the butt of my Glock, and I concentrated on wrapping my hand around the grip, heaving it from my holster. There was a shell in the chamber. The gun was very heavy; my hands were shaking, and I thought: Can’t hit the girl, just don’t hit the girl …

Now, in my head: Jason, no!

I pulled the trigger.

Rocketing from the Glock’s barrel, the bullet whammed against the invisible force emanating from the circle. The circle sheeted purple; the air sung electric. In the next instant, a fist of energy hurtled with all the force and fury of a blow. Pain erupted in my face, and I was lifted off my feet and dashed broadside against a very solid, very real oak with a jolt that shuddered through my bones.

Wind knocked clean out. Unable to breathe, I clutched at my chest, writhing in the dirt, struggling to pull in a precious mouthful of air—and I thought of that poor girl from so long ago.

A mistake. Suddenly, it was as if a giant hand had descended from the sky, clamped around my throat, my mouth, my nose. I couldn’t breathe. Mouth dropping open in a silent scream, gawping, trying to make my lungs work, drink in air. My chest burned; something was squeezing, cinching down around my ribs. My world shrank, my vision nibbled away at the margins, and if that amulet still burned, I no longer felt it.

Darkness before my bulging eyes. I was on my back, staring into a canopy of a blackness darker than night. Couldn’t feel the snow. Pulse thudding in my temples, my mind slowing down, the thoughts like single words sketched in black marker.

Need.

Air.

From the space above my body, the darkness … shifted.

The night peeled away like a wrapping tugged to one side, a curtain lifted, a door opened—And then Sarah Wylde was there.

She said something and moved her hands over my body. I don’t know what she said, couldn’t tell above the roar in my ears, but then the ache in my chest eased. My throat opened, and I pulled in a shrieking, burning breath of cold air—and then another.

A hand taking mine. Sarah’s grip steady and sure, and now it was her voice in my head: Get up. We have to go together. You have the Sight, now use it!

Somehow I was on my feet, and it was as if things began to tumble into place like cogs meshing with new energy. Perhaps no more than a minute had passed since I’d fired my weapon, but I saw that Dickert, blue and terrible, was bestride the girl, and Sarah’s face was a shimmering oval of pure white light in my new eyes.

What Rollins had said about yantra tattoos: Some make the wearer invisible.

She’d been the presence at my side. Needing me?

Yes. I was the Sight. I could lead. I was the light she needed to see.

“Open the door, Jason.” Speaking now, her voice humming with urgency. “We have to cross into the circle, but we can’t do it unless you open the door.”

“I don’t know how,” I said.

I shouldn’t have been able to see the green fire in her eyes, but I did, just as I knew Dickert’s were red coals. “Open your hands, Jason. Open your hands.”

What? An image shot into my brain—the rabbi, in the kitchen, his fist bunched against his chest: Open your heart.

My palms itched. They began to heat. I stared, and they were glowing, beginning to crackle, and now the air they held whirled, the strands of two glowing orbs of energy coalescing, one in each palm, pulling together like the arms of a Milky Way galaxy spinning backward.

Without knowing why I did it, yet understanding that this was the only way, I thrust my hands toward the field. The moment of contact was brutal and solid, like twin jackhammers punching through concrete that rattled to my shoulders and down my spine. A tremendous BOOM, and then the field shattered, turning into opaque shards that sprayed indigo rooster tails of eerie light.

And then we were through, Sarah’s hand clamped firmly around my wrist, moving with the speed of avenging angels.

Dickert—whatever he was—roared. Wheeling about, he started for us. His body bent, shifted, transmogrified, and now a fan of sinewy dragons sprouted from his torso. They bellowed.

“Get the girl!” Sarah shouted. She let go. “Then get out of here!”

“Not without you!”

“No time!” And then she was sprinting for Dickert, driving hard, running full tilt, hair billowing.

Rearing up, the dragons spouted fire.

“Sarah!” I shouted. Somehow I had reached the girl; she was quaking under my hands, shivering as if with a lethal fever. “It’s okay,” I said, thinking, liar, liar!

With a bugling ululation, the dragons let loose fireballs: huge, all orange-yellow flame.

Sarah saw them coming. Still running, she lifted both arms in a great fluttering motion as if snapping a sheet. An instant later, the fireballs connected, squashing flat against some invisible mantle, raining flames on either side of an invisible dome.

Her tattoos—how could I see them? Her tattoos were moving. A spray of arms, muscular and thick with scythe-like talons, unspooled from her body, like those from a many-armed goddess. They whip-snapped the distance between her and Dickert, powerful hands clamping around the dragons’ necks even as the dragons twined round her arms. When they crashed together, the air split with a cannonade of thunder.

And then the most remarkable thing: Sarah’s form blurred, got fuzzy—and then the girl, the one I’d seen die in silent agony over forty years ago, stepped away from Sarah’s body. The girl was all colors and no colors; her eyes were white light, and when she opened her mouth, brilliant lambent pillars shot forth as if all the heavens had gathered in that one place, in that one time.

Dickert bellowed as the light splashed and broke over him, and he backpedaled, off balance. The dragons’ heads smoked, then sprouted frills of fire. The air thrummed with a high-pitched squealing that shook the earth beneath my feet. The dragons dissolved, and then Dickert—just a man, now—went down.

Sarah reeled, then stumbled backward as the girl tore herself free, spreading upon the air, now white, now black as a mantle of the deepest starless night—and flung herself over Dickert’s body.

And yet I could see everything, and I knew that what I saw now was tit for tat. Death dealt out in equal measure.

Dickert’s back arched, yet no sound issued from his wide open mouth. He was slowly suffocating, and I knew just what that felt like. His legs flexed and pedaled to nowhere. His hands were at his throat, his fingers clawing his own flesh to bloody ribbons. His face was going plummy purple, eyes bulging now not in rage or triumph but terror.

Still holding the girl, I knelt beside Sarah. Touched her shoulder. She pulled her head around, and with my strange new sight, I saw that her eyes were still green, but for the moment, there was no one else there.

I looked at Dickert. His legs were shivering, his hands fluttering in death tremors.

“It’s over,” Sarah said. “Until next time.”

VII

When Rollins and Arlington’s finest showed up at Dickert’s rentals, they found a clutch of seven girls in each. The youngest was ten, the eldest seventeen. Each had either been sold by their families or simply kidnapped. Of the twenty-one girls, thirteen were from South Vietnam, seven from Thailand, seven from Cambodia; all were smuggled in by way of the Canadian border into Minnesota. The houses were overseen by “mothers” hired to run the brothels.

They never found Call-Me-Bob. But the girl’s name was Tevy.

Cambodian for “Angel.”

In time, the DA saw the wisdom of not stringing up Lily Hopkins as an example. A smart DA, he got her remanded to a psychiatric facility and from there, probation and home.

I’m told Lily wasn’t in an institution very long. Her father came to be with her. They probably have a long row to hoe before they’re a family again.

But.

We live in hope.

Never did figure out who that poor Vietnamese girl had been. Sarah didn’t get a name, sorry, but she thought the girl might have been a collective Presence. Many villages in Vietnam and Cambodia had spirits attached to them. So perhaps the girl was the village, and the monk was dead. So.

What was past was past.

We couldn’t have taken it further, anyway. When I went back to look at the DVD, the disk was empty. Poof. Like magic.

As if I’d been allowed to see only what was required to act.

All accounts balanced.

And Sarah Wylde:

“A seer?” I asked. This was five days later. We were drinking good coffee—excellent coffee—at a little Ethiopian bakery-café off U in the Shaw District. “I’m no prophet.”

“Not a seer. A See-er. You’ve got the gift of Sight, not Future Sight, not clairvoyance, but the ability to see manifestations no one else can—and probably more abilities you don’t know. It’s what makes you a good detective. Your hunches? Those sudden aha moments when everything clicks into place?” She gave a lopsided smile, but her lip was almost normal. “That’s part of it. You’ve got something special.”

Then she touched her fingertips first to my forehead and then my chest, over my heart.

The place where, a year ago, another woman—different and yet somehow the same—placed her hand and told me why she’d waited around until I’d figured things out. Her mission, you might say.

“There and there,” Sarah said. “You’ve been … marked. You’re different.”

“But I’m just a cop.”

Who’s been touched by a woman who might have been an angel.

“If you were just or only a cop, you couldn’t have seen my avatars. Dickert would have been just a man. You’d never have found him. I’d never have found him either. Oh, I was … drawn to a certain point in time just as you were, and Dickert and MacAndrews and Lily Hopkins. But I don’t necessarily know a Malevolent when I see it. That’s why I mantled myself, so I could remain invisible until you’d found him or … you needed me.”

I touched the place where the amulet nestled against my skin. “Do you think the rabbi … that Dietterich … ?”

“He sounds pretty intuitive. He must’ve sensed something, then given you the amulet, not really knowing how it was going to help.”

“And how did it? I still don’t get that.”

“Let me see it again.” She took the charm I proffered. Stared at it. Then she made a little aha sound and started digging through her purse. Fished out a compact. “Not gibberish. I just wasn’t looking right.”

“A compact? I didn’t know you were vain.”

“Don’t be mean. Look.” Opening the compact, she held the amulet so I could see its reflection in the compact’s mirror. “It’s a mirror script, like da Vinci’s handwriting. That’s ancient paleo-Hebrew from before the First Temple Era. Say, five thousand years ago. That one in the center with hooks like a bull’s skull?”

“Yeah. I thought of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Close. It represents an ox head, but it’s also an ‘aleph,’ the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In their modern equivalents, the letters spell Elohim no matter if you read them right-left, diagonally, or up-down.” She paused expectantly, and when I didn’t jump in, she said, “God, Jason. It’s God, or whatever power you want to call on. And the gems, these are all from the high priest’s breastplate, each letter associated with a specific jewel. The amethyst in the center: Purple is the color of spirituality. Amethyst is the stone of clarity and transformation. Coupled with aleph, it is the power of one, the power of that which is unique and like none other. It’s you, Jason.”

I chewed on that a minute. “What about those things I conjured up in my hands? What were those?” But what she’d said was already triggering associations I’d look up later.

“Dunno. Be interesting if you can conjure them again.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I read a lot. And when you’re in a family as odd as mine …”

“Uh-huh. Tell me something: Your dad being a demon hunter. Is that all hype? Or are we talking like father, like daughter?”

Her emerald eyes sparkled. “I have a very interesting family. Want to meet him?”

“What are you offering?”

“This.” Then she cupped a hand to my cheek, and I felt something almost unbearably sweet, and yet also like pain, loosen in my chest. As if by losing one thing I had gained something much greater, even if I could put no name to it. Not yet anyway.

“A door, Jason,” she said. “All you need is the courage to open it and step through.”

It was going to be complicated.

Later, in my apartment, I Googled: Ummin. Thummin.

Read and Googled some more.

Thought: Hmmmm.

Two days later, on Saturday night: I watch as Rabbi Dietterich blesses a cup of wine to begin the ritual of Havdalah, marking the end of Shabbat. The word means separation, and he once explained the ceremony as not only signaling the start of a new week but as a literal separation of one state of being from another. The Orthodox believed that all Jews received a second soul for the duration of Shabbat, and so this ritual marked that separation as well.

What is this second soul? Who? Always the same one, or can any restless soul come calling? I don’t know. I suspect it’s complicated.

Someone passes the spice box, and I sniff the heady aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg, of cloves and allspice. The Kabbalists say that the scent might also entice that second soul to linger just a little while longer.

People don’t like to let go, even when they know they have to.

Chanting the blessing, Dietterich lights the long braided candle with its two wicks. The flames leap heavenward. The light is full and rich and makes Sarah’s hair shimmer with sudden startling flashes of ruby and gold. When she looks at me, I see the light reflected there.

“Just as light illuminates the dark, so we see that there is a clear distinction between darkness and light, between confusion and clarity,” Dietterich says. “To linger in the light is to know wisdom. To know wisdom is to banish loneliness and doubt and fear. So we are sad as we take leave of this Shabbat and of this soul, which has blessed us by its touch, yet we take comfort in what we have shared and what lies ahead knowing that what is now will be again.”

As the rabbi douses the flame in a small dish of leftover wine and for some reason I do not understand, I close my eyes. Maybe it is because, for the first time, I do feel something leaving. Something is letting go. It is not quite loss, but it’s that same feeling when Sarah touched my face.

Is it—was it—Adam? Has he always been there and it’s only that I’ve never rediscovered my old friend, there all along, because I haven’t known how to look? How to see?

How many other souls are worth knowing?

“Jason.” I open my eyes, and it’s the man to my left. Saul, I think his name is. He extends the basin of wine. “Your turn.”

“Thank you, Saul.” I dip my finger in the wine, close my eyes once more, and dab a drop to each.

The command of the Lord is clear, enlightening to the eyes.

Psalm 19:9.

We live in hope.

And when I open my eyes and pass the basin, Sarah is there.

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