Episode 21: Beyond & Behind

The bird was covered in sizzling energy, and hitting it burned Bliss' bare hands, but she did out of desperation.

Despite her flailing and the bird's apparent ability to be all around her at the same time, it took her several more seconds of pecks before her hand finally connected with a wing, and the bird fell backward.

It didn't even land on the ground though, flapping off and stirring up the dust, and circled around slowly and lazily, until Bliss realized it was going to swoop around to attack her again. It was big, the largest Raven that Bliss had seen before, and she knew it.

She reached down, to where the mirror that she'd been holding was, and flung it up in front of her.

The bird was already coming back, it's claws and beak stretched out in front of the vanishingly black wings, and it nearly collided with the mirror.

There was a brilliant flash, illuminating the dusty landscape and the huge bird swooping down on Bliss.

The silent explosion knocked Bliss off her feet, and when she opened her eyes and looked around, the bird was gone.

She'd lost her trademark smile when the bird, or the girl, or whatever it was, had attacked her, but she resumed it now. It wasn't necessary to let the others know that she'd been flustered. Besides, everything had gone well enough.

Careful not to look directly at the open door, Bliss crawled on hands and knees over to the small structure, felt for the doorknob, and closed the door. She'd come back later to finish her part of the deal.

She stood, swept the dust off of her with a flick, and set about trying to wake up the other witches.

*-*-*-*

There was no single moment that Lex awoke. When he finally realized that he was in fact awake, he seemed to know instinctively that he'd already been conscious for several minutes.

He tilted his head, and saw a fire going in a hearth. Despite that, the air on his face was sort of cold. He tried to move closer to the fire, and someone moved to help him.

He might have fallen asleep again, or he might not have, but he felt safe and warm, and he relaxed.

Eventually the other person moved away, and he drifted for a bit longer.

When he finally sat up, the fire was still burning but the air was still cool. He was in a little room that didn't look so much like a room in a house but more of a spherical tent or a cave. Everything, including the little ledge near the fire on which he was balanced, curved in multiple directions.

The walls were fuzzy, and two of them were covered with big blankets, like the Navajo blankets that he remembered from the state fair back in Texas. Across from him, there was a wall covered with shelves of little clay and glass pots and vials and other bits of things. There was half a buffalo skull up on the top shelf, and an entire section of it seemed to hold little twigs and sticks. At the bottom, under the shelves, were old books and piles of yellowing newspaper.

There was movement in the other room, and then a Native American woman entered. She was dressed in a brown dress with a black apron over it and had long dark hair gathered back in a braid.

Lex shivered involuntarily and pressed himself away from her. He felt that something was wrong although he couldn't say exactly what.

She smiled at him, and held out a black glazed mug. "Have some tea. Really, you shouldn't be bursting into people's houses, you know."

"You're not a witch?"

The woman laughed. "No, of course not. Call me Grandmother."

His eyes narrowed and asked for a second opinion.

A moment passed and the woman drew a three legged stool over and put the mug on it, within easy reach of Lex.

Sora? He said again to the inside of his head, and then again.

He must have looked surprised because the woman laughed slowly. "You're looking for the enchantment, aren't you. It was a complicated little thing. I can understand why she made the deal that she did now. The thing that I don't understand is why you let it in your head." She shook her head. "Bad medicine, that. More likely to kill than to cure, whatever it was that you wanted out of it."

"What did you do?"

"I took the knot out of your head."

"I thought you said that you aren't a witch."

"Witch? No. Just a Grandmother and a weaver by trade."

"I want it back," Lex said stiffly.

She shook her head. "Had to cut too many of the threads. Can't be fixed now." Her eyes went up to the shelf and Lex's gaze followed. Among the bottles and other objects he spotted a little figure of sticks and bits of black and white string.

Some of the threads were cut, and it slumped over on it's side. The woman's words sunk in and he suddenly realized that Sora's voice was gone, probably for good.

He tried to stand, and at that moment realized that he was wearing nothing under the blanket. He sunk back down, wondering how long he'd been in the house and how long his only ally had been dead, and he recalled why he'd come.

"Where is Lia?"

The woman blinked at him. "Who?"

"Lia. One of the witches called her the raven."

The woman shook her head. "The Raven? She's not here. Hasn't been in this lifetime. She may be back soon, she may not. Always was solitary, that one, and suffers for it."

Lex ground his teeth. "What does that mean? What does everyone know that I don't? I mean, there are enough secrets out there, vampires and werewolves and witches and all of them seem to know immediately what all of it means, but nobody has thought to clue me in."

"Their shapes are important. Wolf or Bear or even Cat, although that one was not one we knew before they were brought from the east. The shapes determine who they are, either by choice or by force. Ravens . . . they're old birds. Some of the oldest, and they control powerful magics. They're present at the end of things, and their presence is greatly feared by the ladies. She'll live and die of magic and have some powerful influence in her short life. At least till one of the great ravens comes, and that . . ." the woman laughed again softly.

"Then it will be Dreamtime again," she finished and she looked at Lex with an almost angry gleam in her eye.

To Lex, it seemed like more riddles, but one like, that Lia would have a short life, stood out like fire in his brain. He glanced around, wondering if he could use the buffalo skull as a weapon when the older woman finally moved again.

"You should have had some tea," she said. "It settles the mind and it would have made this ever so much easier. Still, Grandmother Spider keeps her promises."

Lex jerked back, as though he'd been hit as he finally woke all of the way up and realized that the Native American woman had been only a dream. She was only there in the loosest sense, and also in her position was a six foot long black spider with gleaming red eyes. Two of her legs caught him, pinning him to the ledge of stone and web and as her torso pressed against him he felt a pain on his side. He tried to roll away but as he looked up at her suddenly bloody teeth the room seemed to spin again.

He closed his eyes but the warmth was no longer enough to make him feel comfortable.

Episode 20: Outside of the Door

The driver of the cab kept looking up into the rear view mirror at him, and despite the warm dry heat of the Arizona late winter he kept the plastic panels between the front and the back of the cab firmly shut.

Lex didn't care. He'd been picked up in a bad section of town, and he'd eventually been forced to offer the cab driver $300 to drive him outside the city. In advance.

Still, the cab driver was nervous. He obviously didn't trust the young man in the back seat. Lex sat with his hands held in front of him, looking out of the window into the now dark night. Except for the horizon glow over his left shoulder the lights of Las Vegas were gone.

It wasn't dark in Lex's eyes though. Viewed through invisibly woven spells, he could see every detail of the road, and something was urging him onward.

I have a bad feeling about this, the voice said, but Lex didn't reply. He could feel her out there, the familiar presence. Lia was nearby.

The cab driver pulled to a stop, and Lex glanced at the road ahead. There was a cattle guard in the road, and above it was stretched a heavy chain from which hung a "No Trespassing" sign.

"Can't go any farther," the Cabbie said.

Sora's voice, through Lex's body, flickered a glyph at the chain and frowned when it did nothing.

It's protected, the voice relayed.

Can you do something about that? Lex asked silently.

Not without looking at it.

He opened the cab door without thinking and got out, walked over to the chain. It didn't even have a lock, and so Lex reached out to grab it and throw it aside.

As soon as he'd touched the metal, the cab behind him roared. He twisted around to see the cabbie pulling back down the road they'd come up.

Lex dropped the chain and started to run, but the cabbie swung the car around and pealed out, showing him with loose bits of gravel and sand from the road.

Sora's voice pushed at him to relinquish control, but Lex didn't allow it. The cab didn't matter. He turned back to the chain.

How are you planning to get us home? the voice inquired, but Lex didn't have an answer.

He started to unchain the opening between the fences before he realized that it didn't matter now that the cab was gone. He ducked under the chain and started to walk up the dirt road.

There were animals out at night. Rabbits and mice watched him from the brown grass and under the scrubby juniper bushes. They paused as he came into view, hoping that pausing in the dark would protect him.

He wasn't after them though. All he cared about was finding Lia, and the familiar feeling of her was getting slowly closer.

He was walking slightly uphill, and after fifteen minutes or so on the dark road he took off his coat before it became drenched in sweat, but he didn't pause until a gust of wind floated down from above him carrying words.

". . . waiting out here in the dark . . ."

Just like one of the mice he'd passed, he froze as the voices continued.

". . . back to the fire . . ."

". . . angry at us . . ."

". . . stupid . . ."

". . . not going to happen anyway . . ."

". . . dangerous, out here alone . . . killed Bybreak . . ."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and Lex bit his lip.

It's a trap, said Sora's voice, stating the obvious. Lex though, could feel Lia, just up ahead. Only a little bit past the ridge line.

Without movement to warm him up, his sweat soaked clothes felt like ice.

Time for some new tricks, he told the voice.

Slowly he turned around, shielding his hands from view behind his jacket and began to sketch out the runes that the voice fed him. The first set was a minor magic to keep his feet from making noise. Then a minor rune of invisibility, one that would make the shadows around him deeper (Any more, the voice warned him, and the witches will be able to sense the magic that went into it). Finally, he sketched out a circle in his mind, filled it with the basic runes that he would need.

You'll need more, Sora's voice said, sketch out five or six . . .

Alex reached out, his hands on either side of the circle, and concentrated. Carefully he felt around the edges of the circle. There should have been nothing to feel, the blue lines were only faint traceries of energy, but there was. With his fingernails he slowly peeled away the top of the circle, and everything in it peeled away as well.

Two identical rune circles floated in front of him.

Oh, said Sora's voice. I didn't know that was possible.

He copied the rune a half dozen more times, and then gathered them together, holding them like a stack of plates, each floating about half and inch from the next.

Time to go, Lex thought.

He slipped off the road and around the left side of the hill where he thought that the witches waited. Even with the magic, he stepped carefully, not wanting the rustle of his clothes or the sound of scraping against a plant to give him away.

There they were, leaning against the rocks, with a view of the road. Two women, young looking, both with dark hair and wearing heavy wool coats. They were obviously supposed to be keeping watch for him, but neither of them was paying much attention. They were still murmuring back and forth, and every once in a while one would glance down the hill.

They were looking right into the glow from the Las Vegas lights, Lex realized. Whenever they looked down the hill, their eyes had to adjust to the light, and he could have made it most of the way up the road before they would have spotted him.

He took the top magic circle, sketched the activation rune with one hand, and gave it a flick. One of the women yawned.

Another rune, another flick.

The first woman leaned heavily against the rock, and slid to the ground. The other looked at her in surprise for a moment before collapsing herself. They barely made a sound and they weren't hurt, they were just asleep.

Lex frowned. If either of them had hurt Lia, he wouldn't just be putting them to sleep.

He crept up the road slowly, examining every bush and stone for signs of life, and listening carefully for any further giveaway sounds.

He crested the hill, and saw a flicker of light.

A bonfire had been built in the middle of the road, just before it ended before a small house. It was the house, the tiny one from his dream. The tall cactus was there, half illuminated in by the bonfire, but the house looked empty and dark. There was no light coming from the little window, like there had been in his dream.

Around the fire were women, all bundled in clothing, some with their hands out toward the fire. One or two of the faces illuminated by the fire Lex recognized from that night in the mansion with Soraperion.

There were at least ten, and there was already magic in the air. Around the red-orange glow of the burning wood he could flashes of blue.

There was no sign of Lia, but the feeling of familiarity was almost overpowering. It was there in front of him somewhere.

One of figures was holding something, and she suddenly looked up at him and Lex saw that it was Bliss.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and at the same moment he felt something wrong beside him.

He threw himself to the left, and something whistled through the space where his head had been. It was the Native American, the one from the mansion, the one that had gone with Bliss into the hole after Soraperion. He was dressed in black, like a ninja, and in his hands he carried a wand or staff or some wooden dowel. He raised it, and Lex automatically flicked one of the spell disks he'd been carrying at the large man.

A split second to sketch the activation, and it flashed to life, wrapping itself around the man in a glowing string of blue runes. The man shook his head, as though he were trying to stay awake, and the spell fell to pieces. He didn't look tired.

He's protected too, the voice shouted in his head.

Lex's hands clenched, and in the left palm he felt dirt crunch. He flung it up at the man above him just as the staff came down again.

The rod hit him in the shoulder with a sharp crack, and Lex fell backward, howling with pain. At the same time, the dirt had hit the Native American in the face and it was obvious that his eyes weren't protected from that. He stumbled back.

Sora's voice didn't wait for Lex to recover. He slipped into enough control to cast without having to feel the pain.

He flung out the arm that had just been struck, causing Lex to cry out in pain, but also sending the remaining spells down the hill toward the women standing around the fire. He sketched out the activation, and the things burst into spinning disks of azure light.

Lex rocketed to his feet, jerked upright through his telekinesis, and at the same time he grabbed at all of the empty dirt that he could see and shoveled it up with his powers. The Native American was pelted with more dirt, and then with a gout of fire from the next set of sketched runes.

The fire had no more effect than the sleep spell had, but the dust forced the man to shield his face.

Another telekinetic blanket caught a slew of spells from around the fire, and he quickly started to itch again. Crap, he thought, but Sora's voice had a solution this time. A complicated rune of protection, a word, and it went away.

Why didn't you do that last time? Lex thought, annoyed.

No runes, no speaking, no movement, remember?

Right, he thought and went back on the attack.

More useless fire sprang from his hands, but that was only a distraction. With his telekinesis he grabbed the man and jabbed as hard as he could.

It was like a wire effect from one of those Chinese movies. The Native American popped up and backward, flying up at least twenty feet before falling heavily to the ground.

Sora's voice was already sketching heavy protection spells, the first few of which caught fire, ice, hissing bolts of electricity and javelins of darkness.

Me them, you him? Sora's voice asked.

Duh.

Fair fight then, the voice responded.

At least one of the women had been caught by the flying sleep spells, and now a series of loud explosions occurred in the air in front of those remained. Some, like Bliss, seemed unaffected and others shrugged it off but four of the women went sprawling backward into the dirt. Only one tried to sit up, but was caught with a purplish bolt of something to the head and went down again.

The Native American rushed back into the fight as the witches returned attacks while Lex's hands sketched his next moves. The wooden rod came down at his head, but telekinesis stopped it dead, and jerked it back, twisting it in loops.

The man twisted his arm, trying to compensate, but the telekinesis didn't have to worry about things like arm joints. Already off balance from the sudden stop he toppled over as the staff was ripped from his grasp. It hung in the air for a moment, and then began to attack the Native American, hitting him viciously over the head until he stopped trying to get up.

Lex's hands finished their complex dancing, leaving a crescent of linked runes. They pulsed momentarily and expanded, growing diffuse until they'd melted away.

Then there was a rumble, and the ground around the fire shook. Fingers of sharp stone shot up in the midst of the witches, throwing them around like dolls, and from their points they glowed with electricity which arced out, slicing through the dolls.

Only Bliss was left standing, untouched in a circle of clear ground, the lightning ignoring her. She looked at her scattered sisters, and then slowly bent her knees, leaning back into a position that reminded him of a karate pose, placing the hand mirror that she was holding on the ground at the same time. She didn't kick or punch though, she just raised her arms into a defensive posture and looked at him.

She hasn't attacked us yet, Sora's voice pointed out. She's just stood there for the entire time.

I wonder why? Lex thought to himself and then out loud he called, "Why didn't you attack with the others?"

Bliss shrugged slowly. "It's good for them, to be in a fight against someone creative with magic. They spar amongst themselves, but only know a few tricks and think they've mastered magical combat. You have the range of a Mage, the speed of cheetah, the creativity of an artist."

His mouth opened a bit, and she gave him a level look. "Why so surprised?" she asked.

"I didn't expect you to answer my question."

"How will you ever learn if I don't?"

He looked at her closely for the first time. She was smiling, just as every other time he'd seen her, but she seemed serious enough.

"Are we going to fight?" he asked her after a pause.

"Of course."

They stood facing each other for a few more moments and then he asked, "Uh . . . should I count to three or something?"

"You can start whenever."

"Oh."

Sora's voice murmured, That sounds bad.

So Lex raised his arms and hesitated at the still form of Bliss.

Then he sketched the first blue line in the air, and her arms whipped into action.

The first of Lex's shields were just getting up when the first of Bliss' attacks struck them. Instead of vanishing they clung to the invisible barriers, pressing on them and eating away at them like acid. A jab of telekinesis disrupted the spell that was eating away at his defenses, but it was all that Sora's voice could do to work up new protection spells before the next volley of light and heat hit him in a shower of iridescent bolts of lightning.

All of the other witches that he'd fought had been slow. They'd chant something, and Lex would have three or four spells sketched and away before they'd finished their first. Now the tables were turned. The ground around him splintered and cracked. The dry bushes burst into flame for a moment before disintegrating away to dust. The air filled with the smell of ozone. And Bliss never hesitated, continually throwing spell after spell at him.

Sora's voice finally managed to throw an attack between multiple protection spells, but it did nothing. Bliss almost negligently canceled it out with a flick of her wrist.

So Lex lashed out with his telekinesis, driven by the resurgence of adrenaline as beams of energized air flickered around him.

Bliss countered that as well.

And then she hit him back with her own telekinesis.

Lex threw up a blanket around himself but Bliss poked at it with her own abilities, blows that made what he'd done to the Native American look like a friendly pat. They were sharp pokes too, as though she was forming her abilities into two foot long needles.

Lex concentrated, trying to harden the blanket into a wall, but each time his concentration slipped Bliss was right there, probing and the jamming her powers home, ripping his shirt to shreds, and his skin beneath it.

She's . . . better . . . than . . . we . . . are . . ., the voice managed in between spurts of heavy concentration, and Lex could feel that he was correct. Her attacks were layered, building up from the energy of previous attacks, and their defenses were not. Not to mention that if Lex himself lost concentration, she could rip his defenses apart with her telekinesis.

The door, Lex thought back, but it looked hopeless. It was behind Bliss, much too far, and with each volley of destructive magic it looked even more out of reach.

Then then sky moved. Flickered, a bit, behind where Bliss stood.

Something resolved out of the darkness, like it had been just made. Lex and the voice were busy with other things, but for a moment it seemed to Lex like another attack. Perhaps another witch hidden by the darkness.

It didn't aim for them though. It lanced straight for Bliss and passed through her magical barriers like they didn't exist. The runes composing them turned from blue to red in an instant, and then faded completely.

Bliss had a moment to look around, and then she screamed.

Whatever hit her seemed to burst apart, a mass of inky blackness and claws, and the attacks against Lex ceased.

Lex ran for the door. Sora's voice, suddenly free for attacks, began to rain spells back at Bliss. Some of them were cast aside, but some finally found their mark.

Lex was almost there, almost to the door, and the presence of Lia . . . even though it was weird now. It echoed oddly, as though she wasn't just behind the door. But Lex didn't have time for that. He reached the handle, not even considering that it could be locked, and flung it open.

Golden light was through the door, and he flung himself into it, warmth seeping up at the same time that everything faded to black.

Episode 19: Raven Dreams

At first the beautiful rooms and dresses and the attention from Annabelle was enough for Lia but since her Hunt, she'd been restless and preoccupied.

Annabelle was annoyed. She'd picked up on Lia's mood and her own irritation was showing.

"This is important," she said, mindlessly waving the hot air in the room around with her hand.

Lia focused on the book for just a moment.

It was Math, but her attention slipped away again before Annabelle even registered her look.

"If you do the problems on page 187, we can take a break . . ."

Lia stood up abruptly, and Annabelle started.

"I need to go to the bathroom," Lia told her.

Annabelle nodded slowly, as though she didn't want to do so, but thought of acceptance, and thought it toward Annabelle.

It was a trick that she'd learned from Mr. Mohan. Everywhere he went he exuded power and authority, even when he wasn't doing it consciously. For her it was always an effort, but she found it was just as effective. Annabelle would nod and follow her suggestions. Once, at dinner, she could have sworn that it had worked on Miss Chi-Wong and Michael but only until Mr. Mohan had entered the room.

She'd only done it that one time around Mr. Mohan, and that was enough. His smell had been . . . scary, like he was angry. He'd seemed nice enough still but Lia had felt so sick with worry throughout the dinner that she'd thrown up in her room later.

Lia got up and slipped out of the empty office that they used for lessons, made her way to the bedroom. Instead of the bathroom, she went to the window.

They were high up, six stories at the very least, but the height didn't scare Lia any more. She pulled on the crank to open the window but it didn't budge. She looked for a lock or a catch, but couldn't see one. She pushed harder but there was still no movement. A bit more, harder, harder, and suddenly the crank made a cracking noise and spun loosely on it's bolt.

The window opened a fraction of an inch. A few more cranks, and she had a few inches of space. Not nearly enough for a girl to slip out.

But fine for a bird.

She shifted. It was effortless now, like rustling her feathers before taking flight, and she hopped up to the open window frame.

The sun caught her glossy black feathers. She examined the gap momentarily, and then slipped out into the air.

It was a colder day outside than it appeared, but as a bird it was perfect. A few flaps and she was soaring away from the tower of apartments.

-*-*-*-

Lex was lying in a pile of blankets on the floor in a cheap hotel room on the northern side of Las Vegas.

With the help of Sora's voice, he could have still be staying in the penthouse apartments, but he suspected that these little clapboard places were safer. Less likely to be watched by the vampires and the witches . . . and possibly the werewolves.

If they even existed.

Sora's voice told him that they did. That they could be harmed and restrained by silver and wolfsbane, transformed at the full moon, and weren't necessarily wolves.

They can be just about anything, Sora's voice had informed him. Lions, Tigers, Bears, Sharks, and even birds and cats and dogs.

The problem was, there was no evidence of them. Everywhere Lex turned he seemed to run into the vampires and the witches, but he hadn't see hide nor hair of the werewolves. If they existed, they blended into the normal Las Vegas underworld without a flaw.

He'd been searching for them for days, but no one that he spoke to could point him in the right direction, and he didn't want to press the issue for fear of drawing unwanted attention to himself.

He closed his eyes, willing himself to sleep, but his mind kept getting drawn back to the werewolves. Why on earth would they be keeping Lia? Did they eat humans? It had been months since he'd last seen her. What if she'd already been eaten?

Bybreak didn't seem to think she was dead. She'd called Lia "the raven."

He wanted to believe that it was because of her black hair. Anything else was unthinkable.

He wrapped himself tighter in the blanket, crushing the black feathers that he'd found when Lia disappeared in his fist.

-*-*-*-

He was standing in one of those impossible positions from a comic book on the top of a grand tower. All around him were glittering lights and suspended crystals refracting the light. They were drops of rain, he knew, although he didn't know how he knew.

There was howling, but not the howling of wind. It was the howling of of a creature dying.

He stepped down from the building onto the road below, and first saw the bird.

It was black, and against the night it shouldn't have been visible, but it seemed to jump out at him against the otherwise uniformly dark night. In this frozen world, it was the only other thing that was moving.

It looked at him with golden yellow eyes, and he knew the bird. He recognized it, and it recognized him.

He followed where it flew, each step allowing him to cover a mile or more of ground, but always in the same direction: south out of the city, beyond the bright lights of the . . . .

There was nothing out here except for Lex and the bird, and he was chasing it furiously. There was a flicker of feathers here and there, always just out of his reach, and suddenly he found himself alone in the desert.

There was one of those big branching cactuses standing alone in the soil next to a small building. A house maybe, but it couldn't have contained more than one or two rooms. There was no car, only a bit of a dirt trail, and only a small window filled with golden light.

He reached for the handle, still angry, but he had trouble with the knob. It wasn't locked, he just couldn't reach it, as though he was too far away. As though he were a child.

Then the door opened, light pouring through it, and he had the sensation that his mother was coming through. . . .

-*-*-*-

. . . Lex jerked awake, gasping, sweating heavily in the little cocoon that he'd built for himself.

There was something compelling about the dream. It was a map, and at the end of it was . . . something that he needed to find.

Are you there? he asked Sora's voice and got back a groan and an acknowledgment.

"We're going out," he added aloud.

Episode 18: Three Factions

They held the memorial on the third day, appropriate for someone that had risen to the rank of Matron in such a powerful Coven.

Bliss, as usual, refused to oversee the ceremony, which meant it was up to the Maiden, Belle Aldecott, to run things.

Belle was relatively new to the coven though, just having moved from Boston, and her training was mostly theoretical. She had to read the memorial and the spirit convocation from a book, and didn't add a personalized epigraph to it. Several of the other coven members looked uncomfortable with the formality of the ceremony when this was a woman that they'd known for years.

Bliss smiled as she stood just outside of the glade. It wasn't any personal resentment against Bybreak for dying, Bliss always smiled.

Mistress Greenwood approached her glaring fiercely, but not doing a very good job. Bliss was substantially more threatening than the thin, bitter looking Greenwood could ever hope to be, and she would smile the entire time.

"There was nothing that you could have done?" Greenwood hissed. She wasn't the first to ask, but she would likely be the last. There were few others in the Coven that could stand up to Bliss, even if she wasn't actively trying to be threatening.

Bliss shook her head.

"Say it."

"There was nothing more I could have done to save Bybreak from herself," Bliss said happily.

Greenwood tilted her head, tasting the words, trying to find a lie but there was nothing there to find.

"And the boy."

Bliss turned her attention full onto Greenwood, who shrank back suddenly, as though Bliss' big white teeth in her toothy smile sent forth a chill.

"What about the boy?" Bliss inquired.

Greenwood opened her mouth, closed it, and finally asked, "Are we going to search for him?"

There was a long pause.

"No," Bliss said. "We're going to use him for bait."

-*-*-*-*-

Mr. Lo sat quietly in the shadows of the hotel lobby. In Las Vegas so many people lived in artificially lit Casinos nearly all of the time that it was easy to forget that there was daylight just beyond the thick walls. Inside, day and night meant close to nothing.

It was so easy for vampires to blend in, to sit and gamble with their heightened senses in the false twilight. To enjoy a floor show and then vanish into the tunnels that connected the various hotel properties to each other and several of the vampire's holdings.

Lo liked to sit and watch the people come and go. A few were happy, having just won money or attended a wedding, and some were saddened by losses at the tables or waking up to find that they'd enjoyed too many free drinks the night before.

He wore a suit but people's vision slid right over him. If he was important, he wouldn't be sitting in the lobby of a hotel by himself and he certainly wouldn't be relaxing and reading a paper. The few people that could recognize him would not disturb him unless it was vitally important.

So when his secretary Miriam appeared, he put down his paper at once.

Miriam was tall and blond and wearing a silvery evening gown even though it was just past eleven a.m. She looked remarkably beautiful, even compared to the usual Las Vegas girls, and men's heads turned as she walked along. She was young though, only about fifty years dead, and she still had something of the predator to her. The men looked, but discreetly, and no one dared to approach her.

"Sir," she said softly as she approached, and then sat delicately on the chair beside him. "I got a report from . . ." She looked around. "From our friend with the Ladies."

"About the death of their Matron?"

She nodded. "A name came up. One that I think you might recognize." She took a slip of paper from her slim valise, and held it out.

Lo looked at it and frowned. That was deeply disturbing.

"The wolves haven't reported seeing him in the area that they're patrolling for us," he said.

"It happened to the West, in the Executive Airport annex. He's on the move, obviously, but he seems to be out of our area for the time being."

"Sue said that he was last seen in the presence of One of the Five."

"Ah," said Miriam. "I have more on that as well. Our same friend says that the incident that happened at the Coven house on the 26th involved both that one and also him," she said as she gestured with the slip of paper.

Lo tried not to let his surprise show. "I thought that one of the two attackers died in that incident. And if the boy killed their Matron he must have been the one that survived the attack."

Miriam nodded slowly as Lo's undead mind churned.

"Soraperion was not the weakest of the five," he said at last, softly. "And so far the boy has survived encounters with two full vampires and Mistress Bliss twice. And he killed the Matron of the Coven during one of those encounters."

"Do you think that the boy is a trap?" Miriam asked.

"For whom? Me? Bliss? The Ladies in general? The only faction left unaffected is the Wolves, who seem to have had remarkable luck avoiding such a problematic person so far. If you'll remember what happened at our last meeting, it would seem that William is already trying to bait the Ladies on one front. Why not another?"

"Should we let this take its course then?"

Lo shook his head. "Not necessarily. The Ladies have uncommon influence in this dark city. If we have judged the game correctly we may be able to turn these machinations to our advantage in the long run." He thought for a moment. "Cancel the Wolves' patrol of our area, but double the lookout of our own thralls around the Southwest section. Call for a Family conference, in the usual place, for the day after tomorrow."

He picked up his paper again and Miriam, always so good at reading people, took her clue to leave, followed by the adoring stares of several men.

-*-*-*-*-

Mohan woke late, rolled out of his elaborate bed, and slipped on his calf skin slippers.

Michael was outside the door, waiting for him. He'd slept through his alarm: he knew that, but he hadn't expected Michael to be here already.

There were no clocks, mechanical or electric, inside of his bedroom. The buzzing of electric devices sometimes bothered his sensitive hearing.

He dressed quickly, stepped outside, and took the proffered watch, wallet and cell phone from Michael. He checked the time and found that he was indeed quite late.

"Breakfast with the Marcandos?"

"I delayed it until tomorrow."

"The business reports?"

"I have them."

They made their way downstairs. Miss Chi-Wong was waiting patiently in the limo. As always, she looked absolutely flawless and completely unflustered by Mohan's late appearance. Sometimes Mohan suspected that she wore her makeup and a suit to bed.

"There has been a delay in the most recent cocaine shipment, of course," she said. "And the witches are already looking for a replacement for Bybreak."

"Wonderful," Mr. Mohan responded. "Have we heard anything else?"

Chi-Wong shook her head.

"That is interesting," Mr. Mohan said. "Bybreak was definitely a calming influence on the Coven, especially with Bliss running roughshod over the rest of them."

"They'll come, eventually." Michael mumbled.

"But when?" Mr. Mohan said. "That's the question. We have a deadline, after all."