"Everything will be all right.
Everything will be all right.
Everything will be all right.
Everything will be all right."
- The Killers

She knew he was restless, knew he was troubled. Could smell the wrongness on him like some ill-tide had blown in from the harbor bringing the threat of typhoid on a ship full of dead men. And just as surely, she could sense his desire not to talk about 'It" - whatever 'It' was. He shied away from her solicitude at every turn - let her go through the motions of bathing him, feeding him, telling him stories - but there was something vacant and cold between them that her touch couldn't bridge.

When they'd gone to bed, she tried to kiss him, and he'd pulled her close, holding her tight and still. The message was clear enough: "No." Yet he wanted her, too; he practically vibrated with the conflict. It made her ache for him. She didn't know what to do, how to help.

"Sleep," he'd commanded in a hoarse whisper accompanied by a rough stroking of her hair and a twist of his fingers in the ends. His lips found her temple, once. And then, most astonishing and worrisome of all, he'd pretended. His breathing deepened and slowed, his thumb stopped worrying at the fistful of her hair he was holding, and he settled his arms a little looser around her. But his pulse betrayed him. He was awake.

So she'd gone along with the lie, and pretended herself.

An hour, perhaps, passed before he slowly disentangled himself and rose. She shifted and buried her face in the pillow, making a fretful noise like she was wound in a dream, and hid her worry away from him. She listened to him gather his clothes and heard the soft closing of the bedroom door. Ten minutes later, the light peeking in under the door went dark. She waited another five minutes before rising. Save for Dante and the nameless kitten, the house was empty when she opened the bedroom door.

"Oh, Ali," she breathed to herself in the middle of the empty living room.

When he'd returned, later, it was still dark. The bedroom door was still closed. She lay in apparent slumber, sprawled in nearly the same spot she'd been in when he left. He smelled like bourbon, cigar smoke, and unanswered questions when he came back to bed and put his arms around her.

Some time near dawn, they both fell asleep.

It is nearly dawn. Six hours I have spent poring over this blasted book, and I am weary in body and spirit. Thirty pages in six hours. My head is splitting. I can hardly think when my pulse is ringing in my ears as it is. I have not even touched the other two books.

This is nothing like reading a novel. Every page is covered in dense crabbed text. Every letter crawls and twists when I set my eyes upon it. There are codes and symbols that stand for words and numbers, and numbers that stand for letters, and letters that stand for concepts that are never explained. Some of it is backwards, some mirror-imaged, some upside down. There is an artificial language?it took me two hours to decipher half a page of it. Alchemy, allegory, allusion, illusion, ideology, theology. Everything is a symbol for something else. Nothing is what it seems on the surface.

Through it all, crammed into all the margins, are Antony?s notes. They are nearly as dense and obscure as the text itself. For all his flaws, he truly was a master of this craft. I can almost admire him. Almost. Then I turn a page and find something like?

Feyd Helston laid an enchantment upon Fionna to protect her from her husband?s depredations and the environment she was sent into after her marriage. There were fifteen hundred people living in Antony?s keep, in a closed and insular environment?she was never sure when she would be able to feed, or whether some quirk of her vampirism would cause trouble enough to send Antony into a killing rage. So Feyd turned her into something not human, not monster; neither alive nor dead. A mystery, a riddle. A chimera.

Feyd wrought his wondrous magic too well?given what I?ve learned of the Helston past, I have to wonder whether it was intentional. Antony was obsessed with learning the truth of Fionna. He was half-mad with his desire to understand her, to take her apart and see what made her tick as if she were some clockwork creation. Half the notes in this book are references to the text. The other half?

Grace told me a story once, when she was trying to help me understand Fionna?s relationship with Antony. She told me that he had had some of his men hold her down and shoot her, in front of her daughter Flea. She took it as evidence of his sadism. Tonight, I found his notes on it: he was not, in his own mind, being deliberately cruel. It was simply an experiment, to test her healing abilities. Flea is not even mentioned.

All those hours I spent in the studio looking at the walls that hold her memory, all the questions I've asked her, all the digging I've done...am I as bad as he was? When does the need to understand become an obsession?

I have to go to bed, now. I have to hold her.

I have what I need: the organs, the head, robes, candles, a certain incense Antony insisted was very important when used in defensive arts?silver, chalk, amber?what am I forgetting? The knives and brushes for the blood. It will take me three days, dawn to dusk. The time of day, so far as I can tell, does not matter. And it will be easier to see what I am doing during the day.

Tomorrow I will bolt a sheet of steel over the grate in the basement and cover the lot of it with concrete, to bar Michael?s future entry. Then I will begin the ritual. In the meantime, I will continue to study the books, to be certain that I have not misunderstood anything.

Something strange?the books are no longer cold. They are warm now, almost human body temperature.

people are not people
they are anagrams
i see it now
sephirot and chakra and qi
are all the same
i can reach in and
rearrange the letters
spell any word i want
almost
almost
SO CLOSE

Three days. It is done. I am done. I could stop now. I could lay these books down and never touch them again. I could. I could.

I cannot.

Sinjin is still missing. I had not seen Salvador in days. I went to the inn with Grace, to drink and try to think what to do about everything?this need inside me, my friends missing?and Faye came to us.

Faye. Again. The magic must be part of it, though her interest goes beyond that. She and Grace spoke at length, with Grace watching me the whole time, covertly, as if she believed that I cannot feel it whenever her smallest glance touches me. She and Grace struck some sort of bargain. I was not paying attention then, I confess: I was too busy looking at the souls of the others there in the inn. To see inside a person?such a sense of wonder and astonishment it brings me.

I walked Grace home, afterward, and returned to discover Faye waiting for me. On a whim, almost, I asked her where Salvador was. She told me. I could curse myself for not thinking to ask her where Sinjin is, but I was so eager to find one of them that I left the inn before thinking of it.

There is a grave out on the shore of the bay, she told me, that has no body in it. You will find Salvador there. I walked to it and I did find him, near madness from grief, hunger, lack of sleep. He hit me. He wept in my arms. I persuaded him to come home with me, eat something, sleep for a few hours. I will go with him later to help him search.

Faye banished Fio?s ghosts?the priests that Michael has murdered, who blame her for his creation and follow her everywhere. Followed. That had to have been the subject of the conversation between her and Grace. I am glad for her, to see that burden lifted from her shoulders, and so angry with myself for not being able to do that for her. If I could only study faster, learn more, I could have done it for her. She would not have to fear that Faye will consider this a favor done and call the debt due later.

She asked me if I continued my study in an effort to discover a means to bring Gem back to life. I was honest. I told her that I had thought about it.

She was so afraid.

We talked for hours. Sinjin?s possession and how afraid I am for him, about the priest that shut Missie up in a closet. About Salvador. The kitten she found behind a stall in the Marketplace and brought home, who will not tell me her name. What it felt like to use the magic. What I saw when I looked at her soul?she has a soul, still. She did not believe me?it is a tenet of the faith she belonged to that vampires are damned and soulless. I kept arguing it with her. Perhaps Bast will shelter her. My Queen is fond of strays, and she seems so lost, sometimes.

I drank so much. She felt so warm. She was wearing this dress that made her look like a mermaid, and I?

She suggested that I try to purify myself through some ritual. It reminded me of how foul my skin feels. How could I have forgotten? She asked whether I could ask one of my family to teach me the magic, but they are all dead. I have only cousins such as Nineveh, and he and I do not speak. The Elders of my tribe will not take me back unless I produce a child, not after all the times I spurned them. They would laugh, I imagine, and call it a fit punishment that I have no way to protect myself from the dangers of what I am doing. She begged me to put the books aside.

It is an idea, perhaps, that I could find someone to teach me how to control this before it consumes me. I cannot imagine where to begin to look, though. An advertisement in the GangSTAR? Is there a message board in the Inn? Do I whisper the words on the wind and expect all to be made right?

She did not realize that I followed her and stood listening at the door as she pleaded for an intercession from my goddess. I did not know what this was like, for her. I did not truly understand. She blames herself for accepting my help with the wards. She fears that this is Antony?s hand, reaching out from beyond the grave to hurt us. She begged for understanding and forgiveness for what she is. She promised my Queen that she would never try to make a vampire of me, though she has no way of knowing that her blood would kill me before it made me as she is. She promised that she would watch me grow old and die.

Bast, how can I stand it? To hear her beg like that, for me! For me. What will it be like, to look in the mirror and see our faces there?hers so young forever, and mine so old? If there are ways within the magic to extend my life?the Elders of my tribe are immortal?I don?t know the trick to it, but there has to be a way?

I do not care. I cannot. Thinking on it will drive me mad. I have to focus on the problems to be dealt with now. I will buy the ring tomorrow. That is what matters. Knowing how she feels, how I feel, how can I do any less?

She wants to give me children. She said that she believed that the children were ?not all Antony?s.? I cannot ask her what she meant, not yet. Whether it was some interrelationship between her body and Feyd?s spells, and Antony?s body and spells?whether it was his doing alone, and her children born wholly of magic?I do not know. I have to know. But not yet.

Even if I managed to puzzle it out, even if I knew how to replicate it?Missie, pregnant? It is a terrible thought, but it does not matter, right now. I must find someone to teach me, kill Michael, bring Flea home. Heal her. Build the business. Find this book that Bastian seeks. Learn that damnable violin piece. These things matter. Children are so far off in the future as to be inconceivable. But I cannot stop thinking about it.

They?Fionna?s selves?remember their own birth, I discovered. This has to mean that there was an outside event that forced their creation. Surely what was done to her can be undone. She is damaged, not insane.

Hope comes from the strangest quarters.

I was talking to Thorne on the front porch of the inn tonight. There was nothing special about it, certainly. It could have been any other night. I did not feel especially rash or bold. We were only talking about his needing to explain to Fio what had happened to him the night before.

Then Kyrie came down the street toward us, that priestess who is a friend of Lucien?s. Despite knowing that they are close, I have never felt I had to guard myself with the same care as I do when I am with him. Perhaps it is because I know she serves a greater cause, and that people sworn to such service are often more wise and evenhanded in counsel than the common man. Perhaps she casts some innate sense of mystery about her?the ability to keep secrets.

She came toward us like a ghost in those white robes she wears. Like a marble statue?that fine profile of hers would suit on any work of art from ancient Greece. As she was walking to the porch, I watched her, and I realized that despite that sense of calm, quiet trustworthiness she projects I know nothing about her?what sort of person she is, what sort of power she possesses. So I unfocused my eyes and looked at her soul, in the way that Antony?s spellbooks have taught me.

On the spot it gave me one of the worst headaches of my life.

I can hardly find the words to describe how she looked to me. There was that radiance around her that cannot be seen with ordinary eyes, that I have seen with others, but there was something more. I tried to explain it to her, when she asked me, and I fear I failed badly, but it was like light shining through a stained-glass window, both from without and within her, at the same time. My eyes are not accustomed to seeing more than three dimensions, with time in one direction. The light shone in more directions than I could see. Like a kaleidoscope of stained glass, and all of it spinning constantly. I am failing again in this description, even after having had time to think about it.

I wrote, just now, that I tried to explain it to her. I had to, because she reached the porch and in her quiet sober way she asked me what I had seen. She knew. She knew what I was doing without my having said a word. My heart seized. I babbled something about Notre-Dame de Reims, and she said: does that make you far-sighted or near, I wonder?

When I asked her how she knew, she said she felt it.

I begged her on the spot to teach me.

You may be asking the blind to lead the blind, she said, and there was something brittle in her laughter.

Sorry does not begin to describe it.

I am an idiot. How could I have done this to her? Why did I not stop to think, even for an instant? How could I be so stupid?

Salvador and I spent hours talking to one another, really talking for the first time in?months, I think. It surprised me. We had argued only the night before?I told him that Fio and I wanted to talk to him and to Sinjin about everything that has happened, for all four of us to share what we know about Fio?s situation with Michael in hopes of coming up with a solution. He insisted that we needed to bring in Skid, and that bastard Amisoz, and Bast knows who else. The fact that Sinjin was closest to it all, was a part of it from the first?the idea that Amisoz has his own agenda to pursue?that Skid has not been involved for months?he could not see it.

So it was something of a shock to me that he was willing to talk. We did talk, and I questioned him on his peculiar gift of psychometry. He mentioned offhandedly that he had bits Fionna?s past playing through his head ever since he had come into contact with those temporary tattoos that Michael left for Missie. In addition to the cold iron shavings, they were loaded with her blood.

?I wonder what would have happened if I had come into contact with them, allergic as my kind often are to Kindred blood? I wonder if there was anything else in them, that could have hurt Sinjin? Michael is a fiend?I forget sometimes that he is also fiendishly clever.

I thought to ask him about her past, for the first time. On hints of Fionna?s absconded memories we looked through some of her art, found a book full of drawings. It is of a sort that one must flip through the pages rapidly, so that the drawings animate and seem to move. It was of two men leaning over the viewer and speaking. Salvador chanted infernal syllables in time to the movement of their mouths.

Then he?it was Antony?said: Fionna, I have need of you?come forth. I have a task for your soul, so that one does not fall into the depths of the hells below us and take another with him.

Antony. This is all Antony?s fault. Her memories as seen by Salvador, the things she has told me herself, the flip book, the inscriptions on the Studio walls, Perish?s photo album, the damage I saw to her soul when I looked at it. They were all pieces to a puzzle she could not herself explain. Her family bled her dry, staged her funeral, and put her into the family crypt so that Antony would believe her dead. But she is a vampire, and bleeding her was not enough to kill her. He did not know that?he was so obsessed with uncovering the truth of her, and he never fully succeeded. He thought she was dead. When he needed her again for one or another of his machinations, he went with another man to the crypt and cast a spell on her to resurrect her. But she was not dead.

She was not dead, and the spell frayed her soul apart like strands of a rope. It is all connected at the heart, still. I have seen it. But Antony is responsible for this terrible hurt to her. I have to study the other book. There must be something in it, somewhere, about the spell he used. My Queen, I pray for his safe return to Rhydin, someday. I beg You for the opportunity to lay my hands upon him.

It was a miracle that I finally understood it all, and what I did next was an utter tragedy.

She came in to see what we were doing. Salvador was pleased as bloody punch. Tell her, he said. And I did not think. I just?spilled it all out for her, right in front of an audience. Here is the horror of what was done to you, that you were hurt so badly by that you have not been able to tell it even to yourself. Let me explain it in excruciating detail.

Did I expect a pat on the fucking back? A ?well done? perhaps? A gold star?

She retreated into herself, into utter catatonia. Salvador sat there and poked at her, and I could have murdered him. Then, whether it was something he did?he was humming some tune?or some internal decision she made, Missie came out weeping and fretful.

I have only just gotten her to sleep. I told her story after story, and in every one the monsters were vanquished, and it was not enough.

There are not enough apologies in all the world.

I sent Mesteno word that I would not be accepting his offer. In return, he sent me this note:


Smart move. Don't change your mind. Just a suggestion, but instead of trying to understand the mechanics of what was done to her, why not see if there's something that necromancy's opposite can do to help? Dangerous given what she is, but if you're desperate it may be worth a try.

- M

Clever man.

Kyrie has a room full of books. She brewed coffee with cardamom for me over an open fire in an ancient ibrik. She is from a place she called both the Last City and the Twilight City. Alpha and omega, I thought. Beginning and end. She was sent to Rhydin by someone she called the Magister. She speaks French. My sense of her is different, in the abbey north of the city where she lives. She breathes more deeply, seems less?fragile.

I gave her the secret of my nature. I explained what I knew of the damage to Fionna?s soul. It seemed less a lesson than a confessional. She will want a lot more of me than the tidbits I gave her tonight, I know it.

I do not know if I can do this.

Healing, she said, is not a matter of force, but of letting go.

Something was troubling Kyrie tonight, but I could not get her to talk about it. Instead, we talked about my time as a pilot and the damage it did to my brain: the nightmares, the obsessiveness, the anger, the mistrustfulness.

She asked me: what does it feel like when you slip? When you feel like your face might peel back from that line between your brows? And it was

it was like

I felt this enormous sense of relief. I do not know if she saw it. I told her how difficult it was to live with all the changes that living in Rhydin has wrought in me. In return, she told me a story about an alternate life that cast ripples over her own?one in which she was shot in the inn. She eventually recovered the memories of both lives. It was a pointed story of the way this place can change a person. I asked her whether she would go back to being one person, if she could.

She said that there was only one Kyrie, that she had been incomplete, before.

It shook me to think of it that way. What if this is not what Rhydin and its citizens have forced upon me, these changes? What if this is what I am meant to be?

Rekah Dubrovitsa.

That is her name. I know it now.

I love her as if she were my own child and I am losing her and there is nothing I can do.

I have been exceedingly careful since I opened the third book. I brought the roses to bloom in Kyrie?s garden, and I have used the soul sight, but nothing else. I am stronger than this. I will not succumb.

Last night I found a chart on an interior page, close to the beginning of the book. The first column was a series of numbers, beginning with five and running on to twelve, then starting over at one and running to twelve again, and so on. Months, clearly. In the second column are numbers with a degree mark, though they do not correspond to any temperature scale I recognize?the numbers are far too high. At a guess, it is some relative scale shifted up from absolute zero, like Rankine. The third column has two numbers separated by a dash in each, like so: 27-3, 28-2, 26-5. A time measurement, or distance, or something else. In the next column are stacks of numbers written very small, four of them, with a note ?per pint? by each. Blood cell counts, possibly.

It has to have something to do with Fionna, but what the devil was the man getting at?