"Pender's got nothing on you," Nicols said. "Nothing that will hold up in court. You kill Kat, and he'll have you for murder one. Don't think he's not going to be watching. He'll let you do it-there's no doubt in my mind about that. But as soon as her heart stops beating, he's going to climb so far up your ass that he'll know what you're having for lunch the moment you swallow."
The Chorus slavered, and with an immense effort, I bent them back, driving them away from the febrile edge of my consciousness. My teeth chattered as I tried to speak, my words coming out in fragmented chunks. I closed my outstretched hand, digging fingernails into my palm, and tried again. "I'm lost," I croaked. "Ever since she touched me. I fell onto the Qliphotic path and I don't know how to return, John."
"Which path?" He didn't know the word; he was a child, after all, a wide-eyed innocent snatched from the Garden and abandoned in the shifting magickal reality. He didn't know about the Tree and the pathways, about the dark hole through Daath and the nightside of the Sephiroth. He didn't know what happens to those who fall.
"I need to find her. She's the key, John; she's my way back."
"How?" he asked. "How is she going to help you?"
The Chorus smiled behind my teeth, black daggers hidden by white enamel. "I need to ask her what really happened. I need to know, John. I need closure."
He looked toward the ambient glow of downtown Seattle. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Don't we all?" He put his hand in his coat pocket. "Okay, this is wrong. I just want that to be clear. I think this is a bad idea." I could hear his hand opening and closing around his keys. "I'll drive."
"Thank you."
He shook his head as if to dislodge my words from his shoulders, like leaves brushed off. "Don't thank me yet," he said. "If you raise a hand at her, I will pistol whip you myself."
The foyer around the elevator bay was extended by a niche cut out of the wall opposite. A large mirror and a mahogany George III sofa table, round across the front and topped with a tiny swatch of fabric and a vase of silk flowers, filled the space. The hallway ran both left and right, making right angle turns just beyond the pair of unmarked doors that flanked the foyer niche. Laid out like a square, the halls ran the length of the hotel and then right-angled again to meet on the far side of the floor. My room was halfway down the left hallway. Opposite the turn was the emergency exit, tucked back next to the elevator shaft.
I made it to the right angle, Nicols trailing behind me, when I felt a burn of magick. I turned, rotating the Chorus off my left wrist-a peacock fan of iridescent defense. I tried to shove past Nicols, pushing him toward the indentation of the stairwell door.
The spell pounded me against the wall, the shockwave billowing along the sheetrock, making the sconces flicker and the paint blister. Sound became watery-blood in the ear canal. Gritty steam obscured the hall, and my teeth ached with the taste of tinfoil.
Nicols was on his knees, leaning against the emergency exit door. He rolled over, a grimace of pain knotting his face, as he got his back to the door. He fumbled for his gun and got one shot off, before the twin darts of a Taser gun struck him. I heard-distantly, like the chatter of a flywheel-the Taser discharge, and all the fight went out of Nicols.
There were three of them, outlined in the fog by the Chorus. The bright one in the back was the magus from the farmhouse. I recognized the glittering cascade of his spirit.
I crawled down the hallway. Another Taser coughed, and the plastic darts rattled thinly against the wall behind me. I graduated to scrambling like a dog as the three men breached the forward edge of the fog.
My room-605-was two doors down, and I didn't even bother with the electronic key. I just smashed my hand through the plate assembly with a wedge of the Chorus and shoved the door open. As I ducked into the room, I saw three more men round the far corner of the hallway in front of me.
Surrounded. No way out but through my room. Past Kat.
Who wasn't there.
The lights were off and, even when the Chorus amplified the ambient light leaking around the curtains, it didn't make any difference. I was alone in the hotel room.
I could smell her. Lilacs. She had been here. Recently. The Chorus exploded in my heart, daggering into the nerve clusters of my spine, blowing themselves into the chambers of my brain. My bones felt like they were cracking as the Chorus convulsed within me, reacting to her proximity. My vision went blank, Qliphotic darkness eating through my brain. I was erupting, detonating the psychic payload I had been carrying these last ten years.
Katarina. Her hand in my chest, squeezing my heart, breaking my light. Katarina, a tiny part of me wept, this is all I have. This is all I am.
Who am I if it is all untrue?
At my back, the magus hurled a javelin of soul fire. The Chorus-raging and exploding through me-caught the missile, chewed it up, and spat it back at him. What had been a single thrust of soul-charged energy was returned as a hailstorm of black needles. My Qliphotic Chorus drove him across the hallway, and I pinned his soul to the wall in a thousand places.
His panic was a wet spray in my head, screaming on multiple layers of perception. "Shoot him! Shoot the son of a bitch already!" Luminescent tears bled from his eyes.
I didn't even feel the first Taser, didn't even react to the discharge of the weapon's voltage. The second pair of darts managed to break the Chorus' concentration. The third pierced the armor of darkness wrapped around my chest and lit my lungs on fire. The fourth turned the world white-fiat lux-and I shattered, fragmenting into minute shards of glittering glass, like a disintegrating prism.
This is all I am.
All I ever was, falling.
XIII
"I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death."
Somewhere between death and dream, somewhere deep in the twilight of the nightside tree, I rediscovered myself. Eye within Ain. With that knowledge came a vision of how to find my way back. Separating light from dark-quod esset bonum-I dreamed how to fall and-it is done-did so, end over end. A skein of lights hung beneath the gray fingers of a layer of clouds arrested my descent. This net held me, floating. Like a leaf in the flow.
As I remembered how to breathe-as the mundane necessities of the meat came back to me-the sea of lights flexed and dipped in concert with the pulsation of my imagination. Was I breathing in time with them, or were they synching to me? Which came first: breathe or desire? With this synchronization came a dimensionality to the sea: valleys began to grow, peaks started to rise, and the lights began to enfold me.
Below me, coursing like arterial flow, was a torrential deluge of spirit lights. Feeding this massive tributary were small streams and rivulets of glowing light, tiny magma tracks that cut jagged paths through weighty darkness.
Distinct from the yellow-white glow of the streams were the peaks, detailed with red and pink and purple lights like stalagmites wrapped with strands of luminescent flowers.