ii. it's all dirty flesh digging through to find the pearl

"No," Lance said. "There's no directory. There's no phone book you can just pick up and start paging through until you find the person you're looking for. Are you sure?"

JC rolled over on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He'd almost forgotten the phone pressed to his ear, until the antenna bent against the pillow and he had to reach around his head and straighten it again. Details. Concentrate on the little details, like the way the comforter felt underneath his bare shoulderblades, like the way the ceiling looked as though it could use another coat of paint. Don't think about the rest of it. "I'm sure. Look, I know I suck at recognizing magic traces, but don't you think I'd know this one?"

"God." Lance sounded shaken. "I can't wrap my brain around it. The one thing, the first thing we all know better than we know our own true names is that this rule, you don't ever break. I've walked right up to the line a few times, and I've paid for it later every single time, but I can't imagine someone deliberately choosing to -- Are you sure?"

Lance was lucky JC knew that asking the same question over and over again was his way of trying to deal with a bad situation. "Yes. I just wish I'd gotten more of -- well, really, gotten anything I could use. He was blocking -- I could see it, but I couldn't touch it."

It was clumsy phrasing, but Lance knew what JC meant. "And when you're astral-walking like that, you can't even be sure that what he looked like is what he actually looks like, yeah. God. Okay. What were you planning on doing about it?"

JC bit his lip. "I was hoping you'd have some suggestions. Your mom still isn't calling me back, and I've about given up on that."

"She called me yesterday. She and the guy she's working with have come up with something, some kind of way to track the power-traces of the guy who died. The last guy who died. They're looking in Manhattan, though, and if he's out in LA --"

JC interrupted. "They were going to do that two weeks ago. You mean she hasn't called to tell me anything and they haven't even figured out anything more than what she said they were going to do originally?"

"Well." Lance paused for a second, and when he spoke again, his words were careful. "Mom's ... not as good at this as I am. As you are, really, even with you being so new to it. She's got the inclination, she just doesn't have the skill, if you know what I mean. And the guy she's working with, I don't know him too well, but from what I remember, he doesn't come close to approaching my -- our -- level, either."

"Great." JC pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're telling me I shouted for help and got someone who probably isn't qualified to provide it. Why'd you tell me to call her, if she can't handle it?"

Lance hesitated. "She's -- She knows her stuff. Theoretically, at least. It's not like she doesn't know what she's doing. She has the theory down pat, and if it's anything anyone's seen before, she'll know what it is and know who to call in to deal with it. She's got all the family journals, and I'm sure she's been in touch with Grandma, too. It's just that -- This isn't the sort of thing we usually handle, to be honest with you. We stick with otherworldly stuff, usually. People calling up things they can't handle. Things that just aren't right, things that aren't the way God intended them to be. There's a lot of bad magic in the world that comes from people misusing their free will, but it's only got earthly consequences and it usually tends to take care of itself. There are people who handle that sort of thing -- usually we don't get called in for it."

"I'm getting called for this. God, I thought it was bad enough when it was halfway across the city, when it went off right next door to me it was like getting hit in the face with a brick wrapped in a slice of lemon."

"Yeah," Lance said. "And I was wondering why, honestly. But if you're right, and whoever this is is one of us --"

One of you, JC thought, but did not say. He was still sensitive about what Diane had said. "So what do you think I should be doing? I've gotta confess, I'm a little out of my depth here."

"Okay." Lance paused for a minute, humming under his breath, thinking. "Okay. Go over it with me again. From the beginning, the minute you walked in there."

"Yeah." JC winced inwardly; he kind of wished Lance didn't want to hear it again. He was still creeped out by what had happened, by looking down and realizing someone had violated another human being that badly. "Was at the party, and I got the knock-knock thing going on. Except it was more of a bang-bang thing." The lame joke eased him into it. Distanced him from the feel of it. "Got up, went outside -- I threw the usual distraction spells up, just to cover my ass in case anyone wanted to know where I was going, and in case there really was something going on --"

"What did it feel like? Was it the usual sort of something's-wrong?"

JC paused. "...Now that you mention it, no. It was -- Sharper than that. Darker. You know how you usually get the feeling when the alarm goes off that you know vaguely what's going on, what you're going to find when you get there? I didn't get any of that. Just the wrong."

Lance hummed again. "Was that any different than the last time? Did you know then? Back in New York?"

"Huh." JC thought back as far as he could, trying to summon up the sense of what he'd felt that time. "No. That time was the same thing. I didn't notice it at the time, I was too busy trying to get over there and do something about it."

"Okay. Go on."

"Okay." Lance was trying to keep his voice neutral, JC knew. Dealing with it as mentor, as teacher, rather than as friend or lover. They were too many things to each other for any one of those things to be completely comfortable. "I got up to the door, still that sense of something wrong, tried the usual lockpicking spell, nothing happened --"

"The one I taught you? The one John taught me?"

"Yeah. Sorcery, not holy magic."

"Okay. So the door was warded, then."

"Yeah. And they were pretty strong, too, but they were still only first-level. I got the sense from the woman that she was one of the mid-level magicians, the kind who don't know anything about the other planes or anything, they just know what they can do and do it pretty well." Talking about it in shop terms was actually making JC feel better about it, and he wondered if that had been, at least partially, Lance's goal. "So I switched over to asking the holy magic to let me through. I was pretty fucking spooked by then, not sure why, just some sense --"

"You've got good instincts." Lance's voice was dry.

JC laughed, though it wasn't really funny. "Yeah, well. Got in, blew the alarm to hell and back when I walked inside and saw it blinking at me -- total instinct, I saw the lights and I'd blasted it before I even thought about it --"

"Wait." JC imagined he could see Lance's expression, the one arched eyebrow. "Blew the alarm? How?"

JC frowned. "Threw a blast of power at it. Or something, I don't even know. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention, to tell you the truth. Jumpy."

"Huh." Lance seemed to turn that over, and then said, "Sorry, I don't mean to keep interrupting you. Go on."

Now that Lance called his attention to it, JC could remember the way he'd felt like something else was moving through him, guiding his hands. It was something to think about. Later. When Lance wasn't there on the phone, waiting for him to go on. "Anyway. Went up the stairs, and it was like struggling through molasses the whole way. I'm kind of ashamed to admit it took me until halfway up before I realized I was working against wards."

"Well, it isn't something you've had a whole lot of experience with, and you were under a great deal of stress."

"Yeah, well, I know that now, but I sure felt stupid at the time. And you don't have to try and make me feel better about myself. Anyway. Got upstairs, followed the sense of where it was worst, walked in on a scene that's starting to get way too familiar. She was lying in a puddle of blood on the floor, and I thought she was dead. And God, I'm never going to get used to it. I'm just so glad we usually get there in time, you know? I didn't have my notebook or anything, so I guess I thought it was best to try and see if I could find anything of her signature, so I knelt down to touch her and try and make the connection that way, and that was when I noticed that -- she was alive, but she was gone."

He could hear it creeping back into his voice again, just a little, the horror of that moment. He'd seen a lot of terrible things, but that was a level of wrongness he couldn't explain to anyone else, couldn't convey to anyone else. "And I didn't know where she'd been taken, so I caught myself before I could freak out, jumped onto one of the other planes to take a look --"

"Hang on, hang on." Lance's voice sharpened. "You went planewalking? Why?"

JC frowned. "Because there weren't any clues left in the room, and I thought that if I could take a look at her on one of the other planes, I could get some sort of a hint about what had happened. Why?"

"I didn't teach you how to do that. Deliberately, because there are a lot of safeguards I just didn't have the time to teach you, and I didn't want to leave you half-prepared. Where'd you learn how to do it?"

The headache had settled in right behind JC's eyes and it wasn't going anywhere, no matter how many Excedrin he took. "I don't know, okay? I guess I picked it up from watching you, or something."

"You can't just do things like that --"

"Well, I did." He rolled over and tried not to include some smartass commentary on how Lance never seemed to let little things like "can't just" stop him. "Anyway, I went after her, and there wasn't anything there -- it was like she'd left behind an impression of herself, like it was holding just from memory or something, and the minute I touched it, it all crumpled and fell away. There weren't any other clues, and I was pretty creeped out and I didn't want to wait too long, so I came back and --"

JC stopped and frowned. He must have waited too long, because there was Lance again, prompting him. "And?"

"I ... I don't know." JC bit his lip. "I know I got standing again, because the next thing I know I was upright. I did a power-call, tried to take inventory of everything that had been used in the house --" And now his stomach was turning over again, because Lance had never taught him that, either. He tried to remember what he'd done, tried to remember the lines of the spell, and couldn't call them back to mind. "And there wasn't anything in there that hadn't been hers or her friends', so I called your mother and left her a pissy message. I took a few strands of hair -- I guess I was thinking there'd be some sort of link that I could find later, and that was when I noticed the room had all the bad mojo in it."

"Still warded." JC couldn't read anything in Lance's voice.

"Yeah. I hadn't noticed it until just then. They're not wards I'm familiar with, not at all -- I've never seen anything even remotely like them."

"Probably one of the forms I haven't showed you yet. If you manage to get onto a scene again when they're still up, see if you can pick one apart; it might show you how it's made, and if we know how it's made, we'll know some more about this guy. Choice of wards can tell you a lot about someone's style. They're almost as individual as fingerprints. So, you cleaned up, you got out of there -- you made sure you did what you could for her, yeah?"

"What kind of a monster do you think I am?" JC closed his eyes and tried not to think about the way it had felt. "Yeah. I stopped her heart before I left. I didn't want to leave her there for her body to die without her soul in it, and I didn't know if having her body still alive would make any difference to whatever this guy has in store."

It still nagged at him. He knew it had been the right thing to do. Really, it was; if he'd been the one lying there, he would have wanted someone to do the same for him. Was that enough of a guideline to use? Was that enough to judge whether or not something was ethical use of power?

"You did the right thing," Lance said, quietly. JC thought he heard it in Lance's voice, the understanding of someone who'd had to do unpalatable things himself in the past. He was still uncomfortable with Lance's ideas of ethics, though. Just a little. Just enough so Lance's approval didn't ease his mind the way Lance probably intended it to. "So you picked up after yourself, made sure that nobody would be able to trace you through means either mundane or magical --"

"And got the fuck out of there, yeah. Had to pull over for a while coming home, I kind of crashed really hard, but after some Gatorade and some sugar I was okay again. Came home, recharged the batteries, and then I tried using her hair as a link to where she was then. Got the room first, but I went looking for the rest of it, and I think that's when he found me. I don't think it was that I found him at all."

Telling it all out like that really did help. Made it a problem to be dealt with, instead of something to keep playing over and over again behind his eyes. That was probably what Lance had intended, JC realized, and wondered how many times someone had done this for Lance after a particularly bad night.

"Okay," Lance said. "Here's where I want to go over it in detail. You used her hair as a link -- how?"

"The way we did that one time with the knife that guy in Nevada dropped."

"JC," Lance said, and there was trouble in his voice. "That was before you could sense any of it. We've done it exactly once since then, and I know I said you'd be good at it someday, but I was the one who set that one up and you were just there to anchor. You shouldn't have been able to do it, not on your own."

"Jesus, Lance." JC could feel his temper start to fray. "You're starting to sound like your mother. I don't know how I did it, okay? I just did. It was there and I could do it, so I did it, because it was what needed to be done. Why do you keep harping on it?"

"Because I'm worried about you, all right?" Lance's voice fairly crackled. "You're telling me you're pulling off stuff I had trouble with at first, and you're tossing it off like it's nothing. I'm worried about you. I don't know where you're getting all of this, and I don't like being stuck on the other side of the fucking world while you're trying to deal with this shit, and above all else I don't like worrying that I somehow fucked you up really badly and I won't be there to pick up the pieces."

It hovered between them for a minute like a weight dropped in the middle of the room. JC caught his breath. He hadn't realized Lance still worried about him. They'd flipped back and forth so many times, in such a short period, among all of their roles that JC couldn't keep track of them all.

Lance was supposed to be the strong one, though. Lance was supposed to be the one who knew what was happening. Lance was supposed to be able to tell JC what was going on, and JC didn't like the implications of all this.

It took JC a minute before he figured out what to say. "You said." He paused. "You said you were giving me what you have. Maybe -- maybe it wasn't just what you can do, part of it was what you know, too. You said yourself that you didn't know everything we were doing, that nobody had ever tried it before."

"That we know of," Lance said, and then sighed. "I just worry, okay? Promise me you'll tell me if anything else weird starts happening. And by weird I mean you being able to do things you shouldn't be able to do, okay?"

"I shouldn't be able to do any of this," JC muttered, but Lance was polite enough to ignore it and the minute it left his mouth, he felt kind of like a shit for saying it. "Okay. So I was looking for her, trying to figure out where her soul had gone, what had happened to it --" Dimly, he realized he was throwing around words like "soul" without blinking an eye, where once he would have hesitated ever to describe anything in those terms. Somehow, it didn't seem all that weird. "And suddenly I was in that room, like I was drawn to it or something, and the guy was -- Putting a book back on a shelf, I think." He frowned and closed his eyes, trying to summon up the image again, trying to work past the unease it still conjured. "And he sat down, and then -- seemed to sense me looking in on him or something, and looked up and said something. I didn't hear him, couldn't hear him, but I knew what he was saying anyway. Just 'you'. And then I was back where I'd started and trying not to throw up, because when he looked at me, I could see it."

"Hmm." Lance was quiet for a long minute. "And what you saw was the magic in him. The holy magic, not just something like it, or sorcery trying to masquerade as it."

"I told you, I know what the magic looks like. And he had it. It was -- dirty. Like it had been dragged through the mud a few times. You know how you look, when you're not shielded, like you're plugged into a thousand-watt lightbulb and just sort of bursting with it? With him it was more like it had been tarnishing for a long time and nobody had bothered polishing it, but it was there."

Lance hummed again. "Did you see anything else? Any traces of other magic?"

JC shook his head, forgetting that Lance couldn't see him. In the dark, in bed, it was almost like they were talking back and forth between a pair of mismatched twin beds, like they had so long ago. "I didn't get a good enough look. Couldn't really; he'd kicked me out of wherever I was before I had the time to do more than get a surface-level impression. I didn't get the sense of anyone else's power in there, if that's what you're asking, but that doesn't surprise me. If he's doing this, and we haven't found him yet, he's good."

"Yeah," Lance said. "That's what I'm afraid of."

JC licked his lips and asked the question he'd been trying to avoid. "This -- all of this. Could you do it, if you wanted to? Would you be powerful enough to do it, I mean, not would you do it."

A pause, and then Lance sighed again. "That's what I've been asking myself since you first brought up the theory. I mean, I can't answer it, not for sure, not until we know precisely what he is doing. But if you're asking, could I control shit enough to strip talent from someone and add it to my own, whether or not I'd be able to keep the thousand things in my head all at once a working of that magnitude would require -- I don't know. I think I could, but that's not something you can answer for sure until you actually try it. And you know, I think I could safely live out the rest of my life without even being tempted to try it."

JC rolled over in the darkness and shoved the pillow underneath him. "Here's what I don't understand," he said. "I think -- I think that is what this guy is doing. I think he's not just taking the power these people have stored up. I think he's taking the potential for power, the talents these people have, all the natural and innate little things that make up everyone's own magical ability, and -- sort of eating them. And I think he's picking his victims really carefully, to fill in the set of skills he's lacking. It's just this impression that I'm getting, and I don't know why. Is that even possible?"

Lance paused for a minute. JC could hear the horror in that pause. A minute more, and then Lance's breath huffed out, sharply, like he'd been punched in the stomach. "Possible," he said slowly. "Maybe. Everyone's got different natural skill slots. Everyone's got the things they're good at, the things that come naturally to them. There's learned and then there's inherent, and some of the stuff you can't learn, it has to be inherent. And you think he's going after the people who have the inherent stuff he wants, and taking it from them."

"Yeah," JC said. It was better and worse to hear it out loud, the theory that had been building in the back of his head. Better, because hearing it from someone else, from someone who didn't laugh at the very thought of it, meant it was plausible, that he wasn't barking completely up the wrong tree. Worse because hearing it from someone else, someone who was taking it seriously as a viable theory, meant it was plausible, and he had been hoping he was wrong, because he didn't like the implications it raised. "I mean, I can tell. He's working up. He started with a kid, someone who was just starting to have it wake up --" And oh, that still sat wrong with him, that anyone could do this to anybody, but particularly to a child. "Someone who couldn't fight him. And then he moved up to someone who was strictly low-level. Might not have even realized everything he could do, or would be able to do if he put his mind to it. And now her. She had the sorcery, it was awake, she was clearly using it, but it wasn't a defining characteristic for her."

"Yeah." Lance paused again, and JC imagined he could hear Lance shuffling around his room, walking out the problem the way he always did. Lance thought better when he was in motion, which had always struck JC as weird. "If you're right, that means he's only going to get stronger and stronger, as he works his way up the ladder. So to speak."

"That's what I'm afraid of," JC said.

The conversation turned to more "normal" matters -- normal for them, at least -- once Lance finished going through another chapter and verse of the riot act about being careful, not doing anything stupid, and calling for help if he needed it. JC managed to avoid saying that he had called for help, and gotten nothing more for his trouble than a headache and nothing useful, but one thing JC had learned a long time ago was that it was never a good idea to even suggest to Justin or Lance that you were thinking about criticizing their mommas.

But Lance had admitted JC's theory was possible -- ugly, but possible -- and told him to work on figuring out what the three victims had that someone might have wanted. "Call Joey," Lance said with a sigh. "He's been nose-deep in trying to figure out the symbols that were left on-scene, and he keeps calling me up for in-depth analysis of Kabalistic symbology. Clearly he's invited himself in on things; you might as well take him up on the offer."

By the time they were ready to hang up, JC was yawning -- it was late for him, though it was early for Lance, and it had been a long and stressful day. "Call me," Lance repeated. "If you hear anything. If you find out anything. If you even suspect anything. Call me."

"I will," JC said. "I will. If I need you."

"Call me even if you don't need me. Jayce, I -- I'm --" Lance stopped and sighed. "I don't know what I'm trying to say. I wish I was there for you. I don't like being so out of reach."

JC didn't like it either, but honestly, after what had happened in Texas -- fading, blending, melting into one person, no boundaries, no borders -- he was, he had to confess, secretly glad that Lance was halfway around the world. He missed Lance, missed Lance the way he'd miss one of his arms if it had been cut off, but the whole of it was so new and scary and uncertain that he didn't know how to even think of being in the same room with him. He wasn't ready to work it out yet, not when he was still in the middle of all this.

"I can handle this," he said instead. "I can." It was more of a case of him trying to convince himself, but Lance didn't protest.

"I love you," Lance said after a long minute of silence. It felt heavier than the usual conversation closer that they all used.

"I love you too," JC said. He was starting to realize he didn't know all the ways in which he meant it.

He didn't turn the light back on when he got up and went to brush his teeth and wash his face. The moon had been full the night before, and it provided more than enough light for him to see where he was going. He stretched out on the bed, not even bothering to pull the sheet up, and made himself comfortable.

Deep breaths, the kind that got him thinking about nothing more than breathing, the kind that focused him down deep in his own body and his own center. It took him longer than it usually did to find balance, but that didn't surprise him too much. It was that kind of day. After a few minutes, though, he started feeling the usual familiar tingle in his hands and his feet, and after a few minutes more, he couldn't feel the weight of the bed beneath him.

Lance had taught him meditation techniques way back at the very beginning, when they'd first started, and they were some of the most helpful things JC had learned. He didn't need to replenish his power after having done so earlier, so he just let his mind drift in that state of heightened awareness. Lying like this, just breathing, let his mind loose without the distractions of the outside world -- to see if anything would present itself once he'd freed himself of those distractions. He breathed, and he thought, and then the vision took him.

The street beneath his feet was cobblestone, half-tended, full of broken bricks with the signs of long wear and tear written clearly across them. He was walking down the street, east toward the sunrise. He came to himself in mid-step and stopped, turning in a slow circle, taking in his surroundings. The buildings on either side of him were silent, made of pale adobe and shining with some kind of inner radiance, and he knew they would be locked and barred to him. At his back, the sky was dark indigo, the gleam of night giving way to the first threads of morning. In front of him, he could see the violets and reds of the sun starting to make its climb. The road stretched as far as he could see in both directions. The cross-streets were few and far between, and he squinted and held up one hand to try and get a sense of perspective.

He'd been here before. Had he? It felt familiar, in a faded sort of way, as though it was tickling some sense of long-forgotten memory.

"It's a very long way." The voice came from behind him, his right shoulder, and he whirled around, because no one had been there a moment before. He -- she? it? -- She, he finally settled on, noting the delicate cast to the features, the slim wrists and the slight curve to the hips, though the pronoun distinction was arbitrary in the face of such androgyny -- was perhaps an inch or two shorter than he was, with dusky and luminous skin and ink-black hair falling past her hips, long and straight and shining. Her lips were curved in a fond smile. She was so beautiful it hurt his eyes to look at her. "You won't be able to see the end of it."

"Where am I?" he asked. Dimly, he realized he should be worried, but he seemed to have left fear far behind him.

She laughed. "Why must that always be the first question? You're safe; you'll be able to figure out where you are, sooner or later. Or you won't. Walk with me for a while."

She caught his hand, twined his fingers with hers, and something seemed to ease deep within his chest at the touch. It was soothing and peaceful, the way he remembered walking with his mother had been when he'd been young. They walked in silence, toward the east, and he could hear the first faint sounds of the birds beginning to greet the day.

"Joshua," she said finally, not calling his name but simply testing the sound of it against her lips. "There are worse names to bear, you know."

"They call me JC." He wasn't sure why he phrased it like that, stating what others did instead of inviting her to do the same.

She laughed again. The sound was like wind-chimes, tiny and delicate and musical. "I know they do; it's quite funny, when you think about it. Are you well, Joshua?"

He could feel the pattern of the cobblestones underneath his feet and smell the faint citrus of her hair. It wasn't a dream. No dream had ever been this real. "I'm scared," he said, and it wasn't until he spoke it that he realized how true it was. "Of what I'm going to have to do. Of what all this is doing to me."

She stopped; he stopped too, following beside her. She turned in place and caught his other hand, gripping tightly, holding on. Her touch reassured him: grounding, solid, real. Her skin was warm beneath his fingers. "There's no shame in fear. This wasn't your fight."

Even in this world, with its calm and serenity -- wherever he was, wherever it was -- it annoyed him. "I'm getting kind of tired of people telling me that. No, it isn't, and no, I wasn't born to it, and no, I didn't get the mystical stamp on my blueprints or something while I was being made, but I'm in it now, and I'm not going to do it half-assed. I don't do anything half-assed. I don't run away, either. I made my choice, and I'm going to stick by it."

Her fingertips stroked the insides of his wrists, a curiously intimate touch. "You made your choices out of love." It was not a question.

The anger had run its course as quickly as it had risen. He dropped his eyes, watching their linked hands, watching the ground. "I love Lance and I want to help him, yeah. But not only that." He could face it here; it didn't sound so ridiculous. "When I was six or seven, I asked my mother, the woman who'd adopted me and taken me in and given me a home, why bad things had to happen in the world, and she said nobody had the answer, things were just like that sometimes. I didn't like that answer then, and I don't like it now. If there's something I can do -- anything -- to tip the balance in the world more towards the good, I feel like I have to do it." His chest hurt. "It started out being about wanting to help Lance, yeah. But it didn't stay like that. Not for very long. Not once I saw what he was trying to do."

He could feel her eyes on his face. She let go of one of his hands and curled her fingers underneath his chin, tipping his gaze up to meet hers. He struggled against it for a second and then sighed and gave in. Her eyes were pale, a blue so delicate it was almost white, and they held his and he was drowning. It lasted for an eternity. "Your brother is a wise man," she finally said, and he could suddenly let his eyes fall again. "Who makes very good choices. What would you do if you could no longer work the magic?"

It turned over in his stomach, a slow sick feeling, but he fought it. "Go back to doing what I could without it. I learned enough before I got the talent; I could be of some use without it. Not much. Not enough. Not enough to stop this guy, whoever he is. But I couldn't just go back to doing nothing, not now that I know."

"Yes," she said, nothing more, and began walking again. Caught by surprise, he took an extra step to catch up. Her strides were longer than his, and he felt off-balance. The sun inched another hair along the sky, and the pale buildings were beginning to take on a stain of red. He began to wonder how long he'd been there, and where they were going.

"Joshua," she said again, full of contemplation. "'This is my command: be strong, be resolute; do not be fearful or discouraged, for wherever you go, the Lord your God is with you.' If I told you to take up your sword and lead an army, would you do it, Joshua?"

He was beginning to get tired of being called that. "I'm not a soldier. I'm a musician. And I don't really take orders from a whole lot of people, much less give them."

"Yes," she said again, and laughed. Behind him, he could feel the way the sky was shifting from indigo to pale pink. "And armies are of another time and place. But still; we cannot let you go into battle so ill-equipped." She stopped again, and so did he. He still couldn't meet her eyes. "Come here."

He took a step closer. She took his face in both hands, pinning him closely, but for some reason this time he didn't feel the need to struggle. "You called. You have an answer. We see you; we know you. Be of good cheer, and know."

She brushed her lips against his forehead. It burned the way fire burned, the way ice froze, and it started behind his eyes and raced all the way down. He might have cried out, if he hadn't been caught by it. It was that night all over again; mysterious and wild and painful without hurting, rushing through him, leaving nothing other than change in its wake. The last thing he remembered as he toppled off the cliff he was poised against inside his head was the sight of her smile, fond and tinged with just a hint of regret.

*

The first thing JC thought when he woke up was that he'd never, in his entire life, had a hangover as bad as the one tapdancing on his skull. He rolled over onto his side and fought the nausea, breathing deeply and thinking about anything other than the rebellion in his stomach, and it wasn't until a few minutes later that he realized there was a hand resting on the small of his back.

He jerked slightly in surprise, and the hand went back to rubbing small circles. "Easy," Justin said, just over his shoulder. "If I'd known you were hung over, I would have had some water waiting. You gonna be okay while I go get some?"

JC wondered where Justin had come from, and then nodded his head. The motion set up unpleasant consequences in the pit of his belly. "Yeah," he managed. "'Mokay."

"Okay." Justin picked his hand up off JC's skin and left it hovering there for a second, like he was reluctant to let go. "I'll be right back. Don't move any more than you have to."

That made JC laugh, because feeling like this he wasn't even tempted to think about going anywhere, but the laughter only made the nausea worse and he gulped air and tried not to be sick. The weight on the bed next to him shifted and dipped, and then he could hear Justin walking into the bathroom and the water running. He started to feel better as he woke up more, as the nausea receded. Something nagged at him, something about the previous night or the dreams he never really remembered when he woke up, but it was like a wisp of smoke when he tried to reach for it; gone before he'd even really noticed.

"Here, I found you some B-12, too," Justin said, coming back after a minute. "Can you sit up long enough to take them?"

"Yeah," JC said, and, willing the dizziness to stay wherever it had gone, rolled over slowly.

Justin looked tired and still more than a little bit sick, the kind of illness that came from never getting a good night's sleep, but his face was radiating concern. Then JC stopped, as something seemed to turn over inside his head, to click "on" where it had only ever been "off" before.

"Hey," Justin said, and put a hand back on JC's arm. "Easy, come on, some of water and some vitamins and you'll start to feel almost human again."

A lake in sunshine, JC had said. Warm and inviting at the surface, with untold depths beneath. Now, looking at Justin, he saw it, blazing just underneath Justin's skin, all the layers of steadfastness and loyalty and ambition and love that Justin fairly crackled with. There were halos of light circling Justin; head, hands, heart, each of them a faint clear gold. He could feel Justin's concern, hovering just at the edge of his own skin. That was nothing new, he was used to knowing what Justin was feeling, but this time it wasn't just observation of what Justin was doing. He would have known if he'd had his eyes closed.

He did close his eyes, dazzled by it. He must have made a noise, because Justin's fingers tightened on his arm and Justin leaned in a little more closely, rubbing his back with his other hand. "Come on, C, you're not gonna puke. Or if you are, at least tell me that you're gonna, so we can try and get you to the bathroom first."

Something must have taken pity on JC, because when he opened his eyes, Justin was nothing more than Justin again. "No," he said. "I'm okay. Really. Just ... not at my best right now."

"I've seen you worse," Justin said, and held out the glass of water. JC took it and sipped from it, waiting to see if his stomach would rebel before he put it to any more strenuous task. "Admittedly, I don't think it could get much worse than the morning after your twenty-fifth birthday party, but yeah, I've seen you worse."

JC didn't have the strength to tell Justin that he hadn't had a drop of alcohol the previous night. Easier to let him think it was a hangover. He sat up some more and reached for the vitamins Justin was still holding. Something occurred to him. "Aren't you supposed to be in New York right now?"

Justin looked away and his lips tightened, just a bit. If JC hadn't been watching for it, hadn't been feeling whatever connection he seemed to have, he might have missed it. "Afternoon flight. I thought I'd come and check in with you first, since you've been making excuses to avoid getting together with me lately. Are you okay? Nobody's telling me anything that's going on."

"Didn't want to freak you out," JC said. Lance had been the one to argue that Justin shouldn't be confronted with magic until and unless he wanted to be. JC thought for someone who'd bitched for years about being treated like one of the "babies" of the group, Lance was a little too quick to decide things like that for someone else's "own good". He'd known Justin for longer than anyone else; he knew Justin was sometimes most vocal against the things that fascinated him the most.

Justin made a tiny, impatient gesture. "Fuck, so it is that stuff. I was talking to Chris yesterday and all he said was that he thought some bad shit was going down. Are you all right? Are you in trouble?" There was a second, and JC knew with that sudden, new awareness how much the next question terrified Justin; he asked it anyway. "Is it anything I can help with?"

"J," JC said, and reached for him with both hands. Justin went willingly, draping himself across JC's lap and nestling himself up against JC with a sharp exhalation, and JC thought he caught a hint of Justin relaxing against it, glad that whatever else had changed, he hadn't lost this much. He probed that thought sharply, wondering what it signified, wondering how alone and uncertain Justin must be feeling in a world that felt like it was changing around him. He hadn't thought about it. He should have. "No. It's not anything you can help with. I've just gotten caught up in something big. Really big."

Justin tensed and then forced himself to relax. "Are you going to be all right?" He sounded so young for a minute, younger than JC had ever heard him sound before. Even as a child, Justin had been much more of an adult than just about anyone realized.

"Yeah," JC said. He didn't quite believe it even as he said it, but Justin needed to hear it. That much, he knew. "I'll tell you if you want to know."

Justin sighed. "I don't," he said. "And I do. But I don't. All of this is fucking with stuff. I don't like it."

For someone who led the life he did, Justin hated change a surprising amount. He'd been the last one to agree to the hiatus, and no matter how much he was enjoying the chance to make music on his own, the solo album was really just a way to cling to some measure of the old routine. JC hadn't realized it, not fully, not until Justin was pressed up against him and he was listening with some new sense he didn't even understand yet.

Something had changed last night, he realized. Something significant. The first faint hints of sunrise, painted across the sky -- He lost the memory, whatever it was, and promised himself he'd come back later to try and find it again.

"It's okay," JC said. It wasn't, it wasn't even close to being okay, but he could lie with the best of them when it was for a good cause. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you." And that wasn't a lie at all.

"Come to New York with me," Justin said against JC's collarbone. "Joey'll be there. And I have a lot of shit that I have to do, but I'll have some time, and -- Just come with me."

JC heard what Justin was really saying, underneath it all: don't leave me. He started to say he couldn't, he had to stay in LA, he had to stay here and figure out who was doing this so he could stop them, because LA had been the last place the guy had been, and then he stopped himself, because some new sense he couldn't understand and that hadn't been there before was saying yes. "I have to be back here by the 28th," he said. "I've got this thing."

"We've all got things," Justin said, but his shoulders and the curve of his neck spoke of his relief. "We won't let the press catch a whiff of you, I promise. You can do whatever you need to do without having to worry about it. Just ... you should be there. With us."

"Yeah," JC said. His hangover-that-was-not-a-hangover was nearly gone. Whether it was the vitamins, the water, or the proximity of Justin, he didn't know, but he was starting to feel almost human again. "Let me just pack some stuff."

"Okay." Justin held on for a minute longer, and then let go.

*

--pregnant, and she's lost the last--

--fourteen dollars on commission, and he said I should take --

::--mildly curious, concerned, vague disinterest but hey, something new to look at in the middle of all this--::

--feet, wish I could stand up and stretch, but it's not going to --

JC felt tired, worn out. Strung up and left bare. Locked in an airplane, that was the worst part, because he couldn't get away from the press of people and thoughts and bodies and presences around him. His skin felt like a bad sunburn, all raw and red and sensitized. Things kept clicking on and off in his head, behind his eyes.

Joey met them in the VIP lounge at the airport. He looked tired, JC thought, hanging back as Joey caught Justin up in one of his bear-hugs and thumped him on the back. ::love concern good to see you again missed you worried about you:: whispered through the space between them. There was a spot of makeup on the hollow of Joey's throat that he'd missed in his hurry to get cleaned up after the show and dash over. Dre and Mike hung back, used to being unobtrusive. "You didn't say you were bringing company," Joey finally said, letting Justin go and looking over at JC.

JC wondered when he'd started to be "company". "He followed me home," Justin said. "Can I keep him?"

"Is he housebroken? I don't know if we can trust him to pee on the paper." Joey reached over and gathered JC up in a hug as well, though less potentially bruising than the one he'd given Justin. The touch felt good; Joey's warmth flowed into him, replacing the endless chittering background noise that threatened to overwhelm him. Joey pulled back after a few minutes and studied JC's face, looking for something JC couldn't identify. "You look like shit."

"Long day," JC said. Maybe Joey would know what was happening to him; maybe Joey would have found something, in one of his books, somewhere. "You got room for another, or am I finding a hotel room?"

"Bite your tongue," Joey said, and made an expansive gesture that somehow managed to convey the sense that he was questioning JC's lineage, his parentage, and his upbringing for having the temerity to even suggest such a thing. "I'm glad to see you. I was gonna call you tonight. I've --" He threw a sideways glance at Justin, who was, thankfully, mostly looking amused and tolerant. "I've got some stuff I wanted to tell you."

"Fate of the world, yaddada ya," Justin drawled. He and JC had talked some on the plane; not much. There had been too many people around. "Boy Wonder told me a bit of it. It's okay, Joe. I'm not -- I'm okay with it. Kind of. Trying to be, at least. Don't worry about freaking me out, I'm as freaked out as I'm going to be and it's not really possible to make it worse."

A brave face, but JC knew what was lying behind it; knew the way Justin was forcing himself to try and treat the whole matter casually when he really wanted to scream. "I don't want to muscle in on your time," JC said, looking back and forth between Joey and Justin. "You came out here to hang out with Joey."

"I came out here to promote, promote, promote." Justin shifted the duffel bag on his shoulder, hiked it up more firmly. "Smile pretty for the cameras and pretend like I'm having the time of my life. Whatever I have to do out here isn't anywhere near as important as what you guys are doing. Really. I'll be fine." It wasn't entirely the truth, but there wasn't enough of a lie in it for JC to object.

Joey had arranged for a car, and Mike excused himself to go and get the luggage and make sure everything was ready. JC stood right inside the door to the lounge, as they were about to leave, and said, "Hang on." He looked over at Justin. "Are you still freaked out by magic being done around you?"

"Yeah," Justin said automatically, and then frowned. "Why?"

JC pinched the bridge of his nose. "Because I've got a headache bigger than Chris likes to say his dick is and --" there are thousands of people out there, and I can feel all of them, and I don't want to deal with it anymore than I need to. "--the last thing in the world I need is to go out there and get noticed. Would you mind if I made it so nobody pays attention to us on our way out?"

Justin's eyes widened. "You can do that?"

"Not for very long if I'm holding it over three people, but it'd be long enough to get us out to the car. I just need your permission first."

Justin caught at his bottom lip and worried it between his teeth. "Yeah," he said, finally. "Yeah, that's okay."

JC looked over at Joey and raised his eyebrows. "Joey?"

"I told you that you have my permanent consent to do anything you think is necessary, and I meant it," Joey said. JC caught a brief flare of irritation.

"Gotta ask. You know that." JC caught both of their hands and folded them together, clasping his hands over and under them.

"I like him better than I like Lance," Justin said. "He asks. And explains."

JC ignored him, even though he knew precisely what Justin meant. "Hang on, this won't take more than a minute." He reached for the music, for the magic, and before he could shape it Joey was shaking him roughly.

"C. C, man, JC, wake up, wake the fuck up right now --"

JC opened his eyes. The carpet of the lounge was underneath his cheek; it was rough and scratchy and looked as though it hadn't been cleaned in months. He felt the sudden urge to take a shower. He also felt as though he'd been hit by a bus. He made an indistinct noise and tried to roll over; he managed to get as far as a weak motion, and then fell back again.

"Fuck," Joey said. "That's it. I'm calling Lance. Justin, give me your cell phone."

"No," JC managed to get out. "No. I'm okay. I'm okay."

"The hell you are," Justin said. His anger crackled across JC's nerves like brushfire, and JC could practically feel him vibrating with it, bouncing back and forth from foot to foot halfway across the room. "The hell you are. Your heart stopped, C. We thought you were dead."

"I'm okay," JC repeated, and willed strength back into himself enough to push up on his hands and knees, then slumped down to sit cross-legged on the floor. "It was just -- I don't know what it was. I haven't been feeling well all day."

Joey grabbed his chin and turned his face to meet his eyes. Something about it stirred something in the back of JC's head, some vague whisper of a memory. "Look at me," Joey commanded, and JC did. "It happened when you reached for the magic, didn't it."

Blaze of power, overload of power, too much, too much to hold, too much to contain -- JC licked suddenly-dry lips. "Yeah," he said.

Joey nodded. "Okay. Yeah." He tipped JC's chin, studying him carefully. "Your pupils are the size of tennis balls. Headache all day, you said?" JC nodded, and then decided that was a mistake, because it felt as though his head was going to fall off when he did. "I bet you woke up feeling like the fourth day of a three-day party, too, right?"

"He was hung over pretty badly when I broke into his house this morning," Justin said, and paced another few steps before getting bored with it and flinging himself down on JC's other side.

Joey let go of JC's face. "Did you do anything last night?"

"There was another death," JC said. "And then -- a lot of things happened. I'll tell you, I swear, I just don't want to go into it again. And then I went after the guy, got a glimpse of him on the way --" He knew Joey would understand that he didn't mean the pursuit had been physical.

Mike rapped at the door and stuck his head in. "Car's ready." He didn't blink at finding the three of them sitting on the floor; he'd seen stranger. The opening of the door brought another rush of sense/thought/feeling/knowing with it, and JC bit back a moan.

Joey didn't look up. "Can you give us another ten minutes or so? We'll let you know." He didn't wait to see Mike's nod, just turned back to JC. "Did anything else happen?"

"I did a lot of things last night," JC said. "Some of it I didn't know I knew how to do. And then --" He stopped and frowned. "There was a dream. I don't remember what it was. I was meditating before I went to bed, the same way I always do --" He frowned and tried to remember the moment when he'd fallen asleep. Sometimes he could; sometimes it was just a gentle drift from one state to the other. "I don't know."

"Okay. I want you to try to do something for me." Joey grabbed both of JC's hands in his own. "I want you to try and touch the magic. Don't try to use it, don't try to do anything with it. Just walk around it and kick the tires, okay?"

"Yeah," JC said, and tried to take his hands back. Joey refused to let go. "Gimme my hands, man."

"I'm holding onto you in case you take another nosedive," Joey shot back. "Because I really think you've got about a fifty-fifty shot at it."

JC could feel Justin snaking an arm around behind him, one hand hovering inches away from the small of his back. Ready to catch him in case he went backwards. He shook his head. "I don't understand. What aren't you telling me? What do you know that I don't?"

"Just do it," Joey said. JC sighed and closed his eyes.

The magic was right where it was supposed to be, felt precisely like it should, but it was -- JC's eyes snapped open again. He caught himself swaying, and held onto Joey's hands with a death-grip. "Sweet Jesus."

Joey nodded. "Magic overload. Yeah. That's what I thought. I was reading this book -- Well, it's not important. When you recharged last night, you didn't try to take more than you usually do, did you?"

"No. I didn't know I could. I didn't know it was possible to hold on to more than you're supposed to be able to." JC's mind was racing. He had to do something; if he passed out from sheer overload every time he so much as reached for the magic --

"What is it?" Justin asked, looking back and forth between them. "What's wrong? What happened?"

"Somehow, JC's carrying around way more magic than he should be able to. Like something supercharged him. It's not supposed to be able to happen." Joey's voice was grim. "C, you're gonna have to get rid of some of it. I don't know how you got there, but if you hold onto it, it's going to poison you."

JC looked up, looked at Joey, about to say something, and then those strange senses clicked back on and he tightened his fingers on Joey's even more. It was in his ears like a low rush of the ocean, and he could see Joey's lips moving, but he couldn't hear anything over the roar of it. Something shifted in his head, and he was suddenly aware of them, of Joey's heartbeat underneath his fingers, Justin's concern on his other side, Mike and Dre standing outside the door; he could feel everyone in the airport, the thousands of people all rushing to where they were going, the mass of humanity outside the door, each of them carrying his or her own private pains and hurts. Drowning, he was drowning in it --

"--said, lock it down, C!" Joey freed one hand long enough to slap JC across the face, and JC's teeth ached with the impact. The shock managed to break off whatever he was feeling, though, and he shivered. Justin, next to him, was quietly starting to panic.

"I don't know what's happening," JC said. His teeth were chattering. His skin felt like it was burning up, and he was still cold, so cold.

"Okay," Justin said. "Okay. We need to call Lance. Right the fuck now."

"No!" JC shook his head. "He doesn't need this, it's the middle of the night for him, and if he knows about this he'll drop everything and rush home --" It wasn't the real reason, but it was the first one he could find, the first one Joey wouldn't reject outright.

"I know somebody," Joey said. "I know of somebody. If we can get C down to him, he can help. But we gotta get you out of here without you going into shock again, and that means we've gotta drain off some of the power." He sighed. "JC, you're going to have to do it. I can't. I know what you've gotta do, but I can't do it. I can't sense it. Do you trust that I know what I'm doing?"

"Yes," JC said. He did. Joey was the one who always knew what to do, always had been. He was laid-back and easy-going and nobody ever gave him a second look until he came up with the exact necessary solution. "Your book --"

Joey laughed. It wasn't amusement. "Yeah, my book. Books. They're starting to push me out of the apartment. Okay. First step is to breathe. Just breathe with it. Don't fight it. Your body's on overload, see if you can calm it down."

JC struggled to control his breathing. He'd slipped into a pattern of short, quick breaths, and he tried to override it, breathing deeply and as slowly as he could. For a minute, his body tried to tell him he wasn't getting enough oxygen, but he caught the rhythm of it after a second and struggled to keep it even, and it seemed to help. Joey shifted so he was sitting cross-legged in front of JC, their knees touching, and moved his grip to JC's wrists instead of his fingers. JC wrapped his fingers around Joey's own wrists and held on. Justin hovered just at the edge of his awareness, concern worry fear, and he struggled to push that sense away and just concentrate on his own breath.

"Okay," Joey said, finally. "Now, I'm gonna need you to do to me what Lance used to do to you."

That jarred JC out of the light trance he was starting to slip into. "What?"

Joey's head dropped backwards in frustration and he let out a little impatient noise. "When Lance was using you as a battery. I know that's what he was doing, you told me that yourself. He was putting part of his power in you and letting you use it without being able to see it, and he could grab it later and take it back if he needed to. Look, C, I'm down from what I was born with, I've been using some of it, I can hold it -- I just can't sense it any more than you used to be able to. And if you bleed some of it off into me -- slowly, carefully, because you don't want to overload you or me -- you'll be down to what you should have. And if it's too much for me, I won't even notice, because magic poisoning only happens to the people who can sense it and use it."

"I won't do that to you," JC whispered. The tide was threatening him again, just past the edges of his own skin. It started with Joey's determination and Justin's fear and all the rest of it hummed behind, waiting to overwhelm him.

"Yes," Joey said. There was iron in his voice. "You will. And then I'll take you down to this guy I know in the Village, and he'll fix it, but he can't fix it unless I can get you there and I can't get you there unless we can get out of this fucking room."

JC breathed. "You don't have a choice," Joey said.

"Joey, I --"

It was Justin who interrupted, looking thoughtful. "This is like after a show, isn't it," he said. "When you come off stage and you're so charged up that you have to do something to get rid of it."

"Yes," JC said, the realization suddenly dawning. "Yes. Multiplied by a hundred. By a thousand. But yes. That's it, that's what it is."

"So ..." Justin trailed off. "This might sound kind of stupid, but how is letting Joey help you now any different than, like, me finding Chris and fucking his brains out to get calmed down enough to sleep?"

Put that way -- it was different, it was different in so many ways JC couldn't even begin to articulate them all, but he couldn't find a place to start arguing. "I," he started, and then stopped again.

"Slowly," Joey said. "Don't touch it. Just open up a channel for it."

JC closed his eyes. Lance was going to kill him, he thought, and then reached for that sense of Joey and tried to keep enough control to avoid doing any damage on the way.

*

"He'll be fine, soon enough," Kei said, coming out of the other room and walking over to where he'd set a pot of coffee brewing before going in to JC. Apparently priests were used to people knocking on their doors in the middle of the night, though Joey doubted they usually brought problems like this. JC had been barely conscious by then; Kei had taken one look at him and immediately bundled him off to a room Joey couldn't see into, leaving Joey and Justin in the kitchen to make uncomfortable small talk. "You can leave him here if you'd like and come back and get him tomorrow, or you're welcome to stay. I have a few extra beds."

"What happened?" Justin blurted. He'd had two cups of the coffee himself, and was pacing off the caffeine buzz; he'd apparently decided that it was best to stay up all night rather than have to wake up in time to make his scheduled appearance on the morning talk show. "To make him like that, I mean."

Kei sighed. "I -- You must understand, there are some things I can't speak of. Some things outsiders can't know."

"We're not outsiders," Joey said. "We're family. Lance told us. Hell, Lance brought me here with him last time. You can't just wave your hands and say there are things you can't talk about, not when JC's at stake."

Kei added two sugars to his mug of coffee and stirred it, then turned around to face Joey. Whatever he had been about to say was cut off, and he squinted at Joey. "That's where he put it. I was going to ask you how you got him down here without him lapsing into catatonia. How was he able to keep his head long enough to realize what needed to be done? He would have been struggling to even keep enough of his identity to remember his own name."

"I talked him through it," Joey said. "I'm deaf, blind, and dumb, but I'm not stupid."

"I'm stupid," Justin said, more cheerful now that he knew JC was going to be all right. "So you should use small words."

Kei looked at them both, and then sighed, hitching himself up to sit on the cracked-linoleum counter with one hip and let his feet dangle free. "I take it, then, you know what was originally done to your friend."

"I do," Joey said. "He doesn't." Justin started to say something, and Joey cut him off with a look, his message plain: not right now. Justin shut his mouth.

Kei nodded. "JC's very stubborn, and he's got a very strong will. From some of the things he said while he was delirious, I gather he's been dealing with something unpleasant -- something one or both of you really should have consulted outside assistance for --"

Nobody in the world, Joey thought, could make you feel guilty like a priest. "He did," he said. "Lance, and Lance's mother."

Kei nodded and sipped from his coffee. "Whatever he's dealing with, it's called the attentions of something else entirely. Something beyond us all."

Joey frowned. "You mean this guy is going after JC?"

"No." Kei shook his head, then seemed to think better of such a blanket statement. "Well, perhaps -- that much, I can't tell. I would be very surprised if your adversary thought himself ready to handle going up against a Magus, however. No, I'm referring to a higher power indeed."

Joey felt blank for a minute, and then it hit him. "Oh. Oh, shit."

Justin looked back and forth between them. "What?" he demanded. "What's going on? What am I missing?"

Kei spread his hands. "Through Him, with Him, and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit --" he sang out on a perfect middle C. Joey admired the pitch at the same time he was being thrust back into memories of Mass as a kid. He really had to start going to church more often. Kei caught himself, waved a hand, and said "Sorry, sorry. Occupational hazard. Long day."

Justin blinked. "You mean JC got a visit from God?"

Kei transferred his attention to Justin. "In essence, yes. JC's power was strong, but incomplete. He'd received a part of it from Lance. A very large and quite powerful part, but a part nonetheless. It was -- grafted on, almost. Last night, something happened to him to wake up all the gifts he would have had -- if he'd been born gifted. Potential turned actual, as it were. It's very much, and very unpleasantly, like going through puberty in one's late twenties."

Joey sighed. Just another thing to change; another thing to come in and disrupt the way things were supposed to be. "Is he going to be able to control it? Is he going to be able to -- I don't know, work through it and still work?" He couldn't say why he was asking, but he had some creeping sense in the back of his head telling him soon, soon, soon.

Kei shrugged and hitched himself more firmly up onto the counter, tucking his legs up underneath him cross-legged. "I don't know. I won't know until he wakes up. I've never seen an actual case of this before; I could only tell what had happened because I'm fairly sensitive to that particular touch. I would hazard a guess, though, that the One Who did this to him has particular plans that don't include his being out of commission for very long. I'd be very surprised if he didn't wake up in the morning perfectly fine. Or as perfectly fine as one can be when learning to control all sorts of things one couldn't do yesterday."

Justin was looking nervous, like JC had suddenly become some sort of alien lying in the other room and waiting to devour him. Joey reached behind him and grabbed Justin's hand without having to think about it; Justin stopped pacing and stood behind Joey's chair, and Joey could feel him quivering slightly under his skin with more than just caffeine jitters. "What kind of things are we talking about?"

"That's his place to say, not mine," Kei said. "I've helped him integrate it. He's sleeping now. You were right, by the way, and bless you for noticing it and getting him down here," he said, looking back at Joey. "It was magical overload; he was given enough power to support his new talents, but he wasn't able to properly direct the power, not without knowing where he was directing it. Like a dam overflowing and flooding the riverbanks. I'm surprised he managed to stay standing all day. Once he wakes up, I think he'll be fine."

"Scared the shit out of me," Joey said. "I'd recognized it from my reading. But I didn't know if what I was doing was the right thing."

Kei blinked. "Your reading? Where have you found books on stuff like power overload?"

"I -- There's a bookstore. Up around 95th street. The guy stocks some stuff that can't be found in your average Barnes and Noble."

"Oh. Adam." Kei relaxed. "I was afraid you'd found one of the less reputable places. No, all right -- why were you looking for books on the subject, anyway?"

Joey shrugged. "My friends are up to their ears in something. I'm going to sit around and do nothing and pretend it isn't happening?" He carefully avoided looking at Justin. Justin tensed anyway.

"Well," Kei said after a minute, sighing, "in for a penny, in for a pound. If you need anything, you can call me. Here." He leaned down to open the kitchen drawer immediately beneath him and rummaged around in it upside-down, turning up a business card, then flipped it over and wrote some numbers on the back. "That's my personal line, the one that doesn't ring through to the church answering machine. You'll be able to safely leave a message on it. I'm afraid I'm nearly up to my eyeballs in something bad of my own --" Joey noticed the shadows under Kei's eyes for the first time and winced, hoping they hadn't been too much of a burden. "--so I don't know how much help I'll be able to give, but I can at least do something, if it's absolutely necessary. Don't hesitate to call; I'll be able to let you know whether or not I can help."

"Okay," Joey said. He stifled a yawn; he hadn't had any of the coffee, and his day was beginning to catch up with him. "If I need you, I'll shout. I think we will head back to my place; when C wakes up, tell him we love him and we'll see him when he's ready to be up and about, okay?" As an afterthought, and a necessary one, he added, "And tell him that if he tries to push himself beyond what he's ready for, I'll kick his ass."

Kei laughed. "I don't know how much he'll listen to me, but I'll relay the message. Sleep well."

"Thank you," Joey said, and he knew Kei heard it as more than just a rote response to the good sleep wishes.

*

Justin was gone when Joey finally stumbled out of the bedroom, squinting in the early afternoon light, and JC was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping from a mug of what smelled like peppermint tea, staring at the donut sitting on his plate like he was trying to convince himself to eat it. "Morning," Joey grunted, and went for the coffee. The pot was half-full, and there was a propped-up note propped up next to it, right where Justin knew Joey would see it first: "Went to get grilled on live radio. Back later tonight after Teenie Rampaging Losers. If you're up before noon, go back to sleep. --J"

"Morning," JC said. Joey thought he should have seemed pale and washed out, but he didn't; he looked tired, but not cripplingly so. "Want a donut? My body is informing me that if we try to eat this, there may be a rebellion."

"Sure," Joey said, and sat down on the other side of the table. JC pushed the donut across the table to him. He took a bite -- raspberry jelly, from the tiny bakery on the corner with the little old Jewish grandmother who always yelled at Joey in the morning for taking too much time to decide what he wanted. Good pastries, though. It was all part of being back in New York. "How you feeling?"

JC made a face. "Picked up, shaken loose, wrung out, and thrown on the drying racks, but I'll live. Thanks for taking care of things last night. I didn't have any idea what was happening."

"S'okay," Joey said, and took another bite of the donut. Keep it light; keep it casual. "Scared the living shit out of me 'n Justin, though."

"Yeah. Sorry about that." JC ran a hand through his hair. "I didn't remember what happened. Still don't remember it, though Kei tells me that's not unusual. If I'd remembered it, I would have known what was going on. Enough to do something about it, at least."

"Hey," Joey said, "if I were you, I'd probably have wanted to block it out too."

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, JC more than used to having to deal with Joey when he first woke up -- none of them were at their best before coffee, really, except for Lance, and Joey firmly maintained that Lance was not so much a morning person as some kind of bionic freak who just didn't need sleep -- until Joey finally let his curiosity get the better of him. "What is it? The extra stuff, I mean."

JC sighed. "I don't know. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but I really don't. Kei said I'm probably not going to know what it is until I need it. He did a lot of stuff with me, walked me through getting comfortable in my skin again, but I have a feeling things are going to keep creeping up in the back of my head and surprising me for a while. It feels like everything's been picked up and shoved around. I don't know if I can trust what's in my head anymore."

Joey didn't either, but he'd already, almost, come to terms with that. "You said that was already happening, though."

"Yeah." JC stared at his mug of coffee. "I know. And I don't know why. All of this is weirder than it should be. Kei thinks that when Lance and I did -- you know --" Joey did know, and knew why JC didn't really want to talk about it. He could live without hearing about it again, himself. "Anyway, he thinks that when we did all of that, I didn't just get Lance's potential, it came with some of the knowledge of how to use it sort of pre-imprinted. He's not worried about it. He bitched at me for what we'd done, but I explained, and he understood."

Joey thought Kei probably would have understood just about anything; the two times he'd met the man, the priest had seemed to be the living embodiment of mercy and forgiveness. "Okay," he said. In for a penny, in for a fucking million. And if they could at least figure out what was going on, they could get to a point where JC didn't have to worry about everything, and could start dealing with the stuff he'd been putting off for later. "You tell me what I need to be looking for. I've kind of been reading through the stuff I already have, looking for anything that might be useful -- I'm working on tracking down the symbols this guy was using, trying to at least find what style of magic he's using. Maybe it'll be helpful, who knows. Anyway, if you have anything else you need me to be looking up, I can go up to Adam's today and run the spell to find useful books again."

JC frowned. "That's right. You said, last night, you'd been using that. Joey, you know I don't want you playing with stuff. It's dangerous, and if you're using power faster than you should be, you might use all of it, and you should know what happens if you do that --"

Joey winced. He did; he'd seen more than one book providing dire warnings. Magical power-drain was a far more serious condition than it sounded; if even a non-mage used all of his or her power, it could cause serious problems. Especially if a non-mage did it; a mage could tap the sources, refill the energy, but a non-mage's body would simply shut down. Even those who weren't magically gifted needed a little bit of magic in them; it was life-force, spirit-force. It powered the whole of the system: heartbeat, breathing, brain function, along with any psychic gifts someone had. People had enough power to drive what they had naturally, but anything above and beyond, any sorcery, any holy magic, came out of the reserve, and when the reserve was empty, that was it.

Joey wasn't using too much of it, though -- would never use too much of it, was too uncomfortable with the notion of what it was doing to JC and Lance to ever be willing to dive head-first into practical applications of magic. A little here; a little there. Nothing more. He knew where the line was, and he was sticking to it.

But theory, that much he could do. And if he was there, if he was in the middle of things, maybe he would be able to remind one or the both of them that there were other things to think about. "I'm careful," he said. "I'm very careful. I haven't been using much, and only when it's absolutely necessary. I wouldn't be using it at all if it wasn't this serious."

"You need to be careful --"

Fine words, coming from JC. "I am, all right?" Joey set his mug down on the table with a click. "Look, you don't have to worry about me turning into some kind of power-greedy asshole, okay? I don't want it. I don't want to be able to do what Lance can do. What you can do. I don't want to have to do it. I've seen what it's doing to the two of you. But in the meantime, it's there, and if I don't use everything I've got at my disposal to help you out I'm going to spend the rest of my life wondering if there was something more that I could have done to stop what's going on. So just shut up and say 'thank you, Joey'."

JC closed his eyes for a long minute. When he opened them again, he looked like he was going to say something, but it passed. "Thank you, Joey," he said. "You infuriating son of a bitch."

"Don't talk about my momma like that," Joey said automatically. "Now, it's my day off, and I actually was planning on going up and hitting the bookstore at some point. Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay home and take a nap?"

"I don't really want to go out into the city," JC said. "Part of what I seem to have gotten is some kind of ability to sense the people around me, and right now there are eight million people around me and the only reason I haven't gone out of my skull is Lance and I had this place so heavily warded that a tactical magical bomb could go off right next door and I doubt I'd notice." Joey wondered why nobody had bothered telling him, but he let it go. JC sighed. "But I should. Falling off a bike, and all that. And if I don't try and control it now, I won't know if I can control it when it matters. Let me go and grab a shower."

"You'll like Adam," Joey promised, trying to keep his tone light. "And he'll like you."

*

JC and Adam hit it off like houses on fire. Joey left them happily discussing John Dee's influences on Aleister Crowley (though JC was listening more than talking) and made his way down the stairs after extracting a promise from them both that they wouldn't get so lost in the conversation that they forgot to come down and let JC see the bookshelves before they left.

"Okay," Joey said to the empty room full of books, feeling like an idiot talking out loud. "Usually I can come in here and ask for exactly what I'm looking for, but right now, I don't have a clue what that is." It was weird, but he felt as though something was, in fact, listening to him. It kind of made him feel better about asking. "And you know, I'm starting to feel like I'm going nuts, because if you'd asked me a year ago I would have said all this was impossible, but I've never been able to come here and not find what I'm looking for. I could work the spell, but honestly, I'm kinda scared of touching any of the stuff C put in me last night, even if I can't feel what I'm doing with it. I'll do it if I have to, but I thought I'd ask first. So, please, if you've got anything I need, could you -- I don't know, show it to me?"

He held his breath and turned around in a slow circle, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. He started feeling even more like an idiot, and let his breath out. Okay; the spell it was.

Something fell to the floor behind him.

Joey whirled around, his heart trying to leap out of his chest. "Shit," he swore, and then caught himself. "No, no, I didn't mean that, thank you, you just freaked me out a little --" He caught himself again. Talking to a bookstore; he really was going nuts. Obviously something had just been shelved wrong, and his passage had displaced it enough to let it fall to the ground. He crouched pick up to the book, intending to return it to the shelf, and then he looked at it and realized that it had no title on the spine to give him any clue as to where it should be replaced.

"Huh," he said, and flipped open to a page at random.

Joey realized after a second that the sound he was hearing was two sets of footsteps rushing down the stairs as quickly as they could without stumbling on the steep and narrow staircase. "Are you all right?" Adam asked, scanning the room and relaxing slightly when he saw Joey with the book in his hand. JC, behind him, looked slightly wild around the eyes.

"I'm fine," Joey said, flipping the book closed and standing up. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Adam's eyes swept the room. "I felt something coming from down here. Like someone was working magic, and I don't mean your usual indexing spell."

"I asked for help finding a book," Joey said, feeling embarrassed to even admit it. "Something that had the information I need. Even though I don't really know what I need, so I couldn't use the index spell. Felt kind of stupid doing it, but this one fell." He lifted the book slightly.

"Oh," Adam said, clearly relieved. "That was smart of you. Most people don't think to ask the shop to find things for them. Most people don't think anyone would be listening. But the shop likes you; it's willing to help you out."

"Wait," Joey said. "You mean -- it wasn't just coincidence that the book fell? That something -- that the store threw it at me?"

Adam's eyebrows drew together. "Isn't that what you asked it to do? It's not just a store, you know. It's a lot smarter than people give it credit for being."

"My life keeps getting weirder," Joey muttered under his breath.

"What'd you find?" JC asked. He was laughing at Joey; Joey could tell, even though his lips didn't so much as smile. Joey scowled at him.

"It looks like some kind of treatise on magical power. Probably exactly what we need, too. It looks really old; I shudder to think about how much you're going to charge me for it, you con artist." Joey knew Adam wouldn't take offense; it was a point of friendly teasing between them, had been for a while.

Adam frowned. "Let me see that." He held out a hand and Joey put the book into it. Adam opened the front cover, checking the frontispiece, and then flipped through a few pages at random. "Well," he said, finally. "The shop must truly like you."

Joey raised an eyebrow. "Why do you say that?"

Adam closed the book again and handed it back. "Because I've never seen this book before in my entire life, and I know damn well it wasn't in stock. Which means two things: one, the shop decided you need it and pulled it from God only knows where, and two, I don't have it in the price list, so you're getting one on the house." He grimaced at the inadvertent pun. "Literally."

"I think you should probably read that one first," JC said.

"I think you're probably right," Joey agreed. He made sure to rest his hand against one wall and say a quiet thank-you before he went back up the stairs with the others.

*

When Justin came back from TRL, JC was sitting sideways on the couch, Joey in the desk chair, both of them nose-deep in the books they were reading. JC felt the eyes on him, watching for a long minute, assessingly, and he looked up; he was about to say something, but Justin just smiled a little, wiggled his fingers at them both, and went into the spare bedroom. Just when JC was starting to think Justin was avoiding them, he came back, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a ratty old t-shirt that had once been Lance's, before Justin had cut off the sleeves and the hem. His headphones were slung around his neck; everyone always thought Justin would demand the kind of headphones that cost a few hundred dollars and completely balanced the sound and blocked ambient noise, but really, he lost and destroyed headphones so quickly that he always went for the $20 cheapies he could send any hapless PA who didn't duck quickly enough out to Best Buy for. Justin was rough on hardware. Of all types.

JC raised an eyebrow at Justin, not wanting to say anything and distract Joey, who was muttering things under his breath and covering a sheet of paper with cryptic notes, frowning and scribbling and occasionally pausing to stare off into space for a few minutes. Justin shrugged -- it was okay, nothing unusual, JC read in that shrug -- and crossed the room, dropping down on the couch next to JC and stretching out with his head in JC's lap. He had to drape his knees over the other arm of the couch; it wasn't long enough for him. He pulled up his headphones, hit "play" on the Discman, and closed his eyes and threw one arm over them.

JC automatically shifted to hold his book in one hand and rubbed the other over Justin's head. Justin made a tiny noise of contentment and stretched, long and languid. JC had to admit he liked the way the shaved head looked, and it was nice to pet, but he missed the curls, missed being able to run his fingers through Justin's hair and play with it. He could hear the notes from the headphones, tinny and distant, and it took him a minute before he realized Justin was listening to The Cure. That made him smile, because it made him think of Chris.

Ten minutes later Justin was snoring lightly -- well, lightly for Justin, which was saying quite a lot -- and JC let his hand still, then fall. He put down the journal he'd been reading -- that of a man named Glory-Be-To-God Danielson, one of Lance's distant ancestors who'd come to the U.S. long before it had been the U.S., one step ahead of the people who wanted to burn him as a witch. It was fascinating reading, but none of it was what he was looking for; Glory-Be had been one of the rare men in the line to have the familial magic, but not strongly, and he'd spent most of his life not able to do much more than light a candle.

Joey noticed the motion and glanced over. He kept his voice down, trying not to wake Justin. "Nothing?"

"Nothing," JC said, voice just as soft, and shifted his legs to try and restore circulation. He'd been sitting cross-legged, sideways on the couch with his back against the arm, and Justin's head was in just the right place to send pins and needles racing through him. "I mean, I'm glad I went over to Lance's and grabbed some of the journals, but I wish they were better organized. I don't even know if the one that has the one bit of information I'm looking for was, like, the next one on the stack, and it's sitting back in LA waiting for me to find it."

"I'll teach you the find-me spell," Joey said absently, and turned a page.

"Any luck?" JC squinted. "You've got a lot of notes."

"Yeah. This is like reading Chaucer, it's nearly impossible, but I think I'm getting about seventy-five percent of it. It's not like anything I've ever seen before, that's for sure. A lot of it is really complicated and theoretical, but there are a few things you can probably use and I think the back is a bunch of practical stuff."

JC frowned. "Why not just skip over the theory and go right to the practical?"

Joey looked up, startled. "Because something wants me to be reading this book," he said, as though it were the most self-evident thing in the world. "Or it wouldn't have thrown it at me. Also, it's really interesting. Did you know that the magical community in the sixteen-hundreds foretold nuclear energy? Oh, they didn't call it that, but they said one day we'd be using energy from the building block that makes all things. Sure sounds like atomic power, doesn't it?"

JC rolled his eyes and was about to say something about keeping sight of the ultimate goal when his back pocket rang. He held up a hand to forestall the conversation and fished out the phone, trying not to disturb Justin, who didn't even roll over; he flipped it open and winced as he noticed the caller ID. "Yeah," he said.

Lance's voice was deceptively calm. "Perhaps you'd like to tell me why I had to find out about yesterday from the guy who kept you from killing yourself instead of from, say, you."

Shit; busted. "I was going to call you. And then I got home and Joey and I went out to his bookstore guy, and by the time I remembered it was the middle of your night and I didn't want to wake you up. I was gonna call you before I went to bed tonight."

He could tell Lance was pissed, but all he heard was a sigh. "I told you, C. You have to tell me this shit; I'm stuck out here with you halfway around the world, and I'm responsible for you."

"Maybe not anymore." JC hesitated. "Did Kei tell you what happened?"

Lance sighed again. "Yeah. And that makes me really nervous, because when things start taking personal attention like that it's a bad sign. He said you got some stuff woken up?"

"Yeah." JC could feel it even now; could feel Joey across the room, steady and solid, Justin asleep against his lap, dreaming of sunshine. "Seriously freaked me out, too."

"I bet." A pause. "Do you want me to come home?"

"No!" Too loud; Justin mumbled something in his sleep and turned over. JC modulated his voice. "It's okay. Really it is. I'm coping with it, and it might turn out to be exactly what I need to break this. Joey and I are working on it."

"It probably will wind up being exactly what you need. Or else it wouldn't have happened. I hate being stuck out here while you're dealing with this, you know. I should be there. I should be there to guide you through it."

The new senses JC had been using all day apparently worked long-distance, too, because he could suddenly feel it -- Lance's exhaustion, his worry, the way he wanted to make sure JC was all right. The way he was glad he had someone to share things with, but at the same time was worried JC would wind up taking over the only job that Lance had ever really been good at without having to try for it. The way he was worried that JC wouldn't need him anymore. Certain things suddenly made so much more sense, and JC winced, remembering the way that Lance had never once seemed to resent the fact JC was so much better than he was at anything having to do with singing or dancing. He knew now that it was because Lance had known there was one thing he would always, always be better at than JC, and now that one thing was in danger.

JC bit his lip and tried to find something to say that wouldn't let Lance know he knew. "And I won't deny that I'd feel a hell of a lot better if you were here. But I also don't want to be the one who fucked things over for you, so stay put and finish the training, okay?"

It was amazing, sometimes, how clearly he could hear over a transcontinental cell phone connection. Or maybe he was just listening enough to catch the little hitch of breath. "You have to promise you'll call me the next time anything happens. I mean it, Jayce, or I'll be on the next fucking flight back. I can't stand it when you don't tell me what's going on."

JC winced; okay, yeah. Now that he knew, he knew it wasn't Lance trying to check up on him and look over his shoulder; it was Lance trying to feel he was at least partially connected to what was going on. "I promise. I promise, okay? Look, I'll call you the second anything happens. Anything other than the usual stuff, I mean. I don't think that you want to hear about the televangelist."

"Televangelist? No, nevermind, you're right, I don't want to know." Lance chuckled, and JC relaxed to hear it. "Anyway. Is Justin there? Kei said there was a third guy, described Justin. I thought J was still in denial mode."

"Asleep in my lap right now, actually," JC said. "He had a long night. Joey said he didn't sleep, and then he had to run around the city and play the promo game."

"Huh," Lance said. "Tell him I said hi when he wakes up."

"Will do," JC said.

"And I mean it about the calling me thing."

"I know. I know; I'm sorry. I will. I promise."

JC could hear running water on the other end of the phone. "I have to get some sleep; I'm up way past my bedtime, and we're doing high-pressure tests tomorrow. Which is ... way closer to being 'today' than I'd like to think about. Be careful, all right? And you know, it wouldn't kill you to drop me an email now and then with what's been going on, if you don't want to call."

"Okay," JC said. "Love you."

"Love you too. Even if you are a pain in my ass." Lance hung up the phone.

JC closed his own phone and tried to slip it back into his pocket without disturbing Justin, but something about the voices or the motion must have penetrated Justin's dream. He opened his eyes, squinting against the light, and made an unhappy noise. JC winced and rubbed his thumb along the soft strip of hair right behind Justin's ear. "Sorry," he said, keeping his voice down. "Phone call. I'll be quiet now, I promise." He took the chance to shift more, wishing he could feel his feet.

"S'okay," Justin mumbled, and reached down to click off the CD. "Thought I could stay awake longer. Gonna go in to bed now. Don't sleep on the couch, 'k?"

JC had been planning to take the couch in the baby's room, because he didn't know whether or not Justin would welcome company. Things had been weird between them for longer than he wanted to think about. Justin had seemingly accepted Lance's involvement with magic, but JC's had thrown him for a loop. Maybe it was because Justin held JC to a higher standard. Maybe it was because Lance was easier to believe as a magician. Maybe Justin was just weird. "Okay. I'll be in later. Go and get some sleep, okay?"

"'K." Justin shambled to his feet, his eyes mostly closed. "Don' stay up too late."

Joey chuckled softly as Justin stumbled against the doorframe on his way out the room. "And he won't remember a word of that in the morning. Ten bucks says he asks which one of us carried him in to bed."

"No bet," JC said. He'd felt the way Justin wasn't awake at all, so he wouldn't have taken the bet even if he hadn't seen Justin do something nearly identical after a hundred shows, falling asleep in someone's lap on the bus couch and stumbling off to his bunk later on.

"He's right, though," Joey said. "You shouldn't stay up too late. You had a rough night last night, and I don't know when you woke up, but I'll guarantee it wasn't enough sleep."

JC started to say he wasn't tired, but it would have been a lie; he realized as Joey said it that he was tired, way down deep in a place usually reserved for mid-tour exhaustion, when all he wanted to do was bury himself under a pile of covers and nap for a thousand years. "Yeah," he said. "I will. Soon. I've just got this sense like it's not enough time to do what needs to be done, you know?"

"I know," Joey said. "Believe me, I know. But you're not in this alone and you don't have to carry the world's burdens on your shoulders. I've got time tonight, as long as I'm at the theatre at noon tomorrow. I can do the research alone for one night; you go and take care of yourself. Let me do the things I can do so you've got the strength to do the things I can't do."

JC stretched out his legs and thumped his thighs with both fists, trying to shake the circulation back into them. "I ask you again: when did you get to be so smart, Joey?"

"Yeah, well." Joey rolled his eyes. "Probably right around the time you picked up Lance's save-the-world martyr complex. I should have something for you in the morning; I'll leave my notes, since I'm at the theatre all day and then I'm off to the club. Tell Justin to get his ass over there after he's done with the party thing. You're welcome to show up, too."

"I think a club would probably be the exact worst place for me to be right about now," JC said ruefully. He really could use a night of doing nothing but dancing it all out, but the thought of so many people in such a small place, all the noise, the bodies pressing together ... He hoped this wouldn't last, because if he had to give up his once-or-twice-a-month nights of dancing in the dawn, he'd be pissed. "I'll stay home. Go through some more books. Which one's the stack you haven't read through yet?"

Joey waved a hand. "That one. Take notes and summarize everything you read; sometimes something that sounds crazy or useless in one place will turn up something interesting when you cross-reference."

"You know," JC said, "when I first got into all this, I never thought I'd wind up spending hours with old books that keep making me sneeze." Lance didn't do that, he thought, but didn't say. Lance just seemed to pull the information out of somewhere, somewhere in the back of his head, and do it. It went back to Lance's lecture about ritual, he supposed. JC didn't know where his own style fell, on the spectrum.

"Man," Joey said, "me either. But you can't do something if you don't know what you're doing, right? And there are plenty of people we can ask, but half of them aren't telling us anything and the other half are too busy to take over the job. So it's just us and the books." He tipped back in his desk chair, perching on two legs. "I actually kind of like it. It's almost soothing, in a weird kind of way."

"Tell you what," JC said, and picked up the next journal on the pile. "I hereby promise that anytime I need someone to crawl through old and half-moldy books looking for the one piece of information that someone might not have even written down because they were too paranoid that someone else might find it out, I will come straight to you and let you handle it."

"It's a deal," Joey said.

*

Despite his best intentions, JC got tied up in the next journal he picked up -- Serenity Miller, a great-great to the tenth power grandmother of Lance's mother, who'd lived through some kind of struggle between two rival mages. Neither of them had had any of the holy magic, but Serenity had kept getting caught in their war. He was yawning by the time he'd put it down, but he had a few more ideas about how to try dismantling the dark wards the next time he encountered them; she'd been a ward-breaker, one of the good ones, JC thought, and she'd kept careful and meticulous notes about the best way to unravel protections that had the potential to be very painful if disturbed. Joey was still nose-deep in the book he'd gotten from Adam's when JC hugged him goodnight and went to crawl in with Justin.

Justin woke up a little when JC's weight dipped the mattress, enough to roll over and surrender some of the space and just enough of the covers to keep JC from freezing. Joey kept the townhouse air-conditioned to death, saying it was always easier to put more clothes on than take them off. "Warm," Justin mumbled, and rolled over to drape half-over JC's side and nestle his face against the curve of JC's shoulder.

Sleeping with Justin, Lance had said once, was like sleeping with an enthusiastic and amorous octopus: eight legs, and they all want to be wrapped right around you. JC freed himself slightly and pulled the covers around him as much as he could, breathing deeply and trying to relax his mind after the day he'd had. He petted Justin, brushing his hand along the curve of Justin's shoulders, absently and with one hand, while his mind was busy trying to visualize the twists and turns of the dark wards he'd blown through at the last scene with the information he'd gotten from Serenity's journal in mind.

Maybe that was why he didn't immediately notice that Justin was nuzzling his throat. It was a sleepy, half-aware motion, born in response to the sensation of being stroked; JC's hand stilled.

"Justin?" he asked, softly, not wanting to wake Justin up if he was in fact asleep, or even really half-asleep, but not quite wanting to let Justin think he was someone else. Justin had stopped sleeping with him after that night right before Lance left, as though he could sense the changes in JC. He didn't know if that resolution had changed, but if it hadn't, he didn't want Justin to wake up in the morning and wonder what he'd done.

"Mmm," Justin said, and licked a line along JC's collarbone. "'Mawake."

Except he wasn't, not really; not enough for JC to be comfortable. He rubbed Justin's shoulder more firmly. "Justin, come on, it's me. JC. Come on, honey, wake up just a little bit more." Wake up and realize you're draped across me, not whoever you think you're lying on.

JC could almost feel the click as Justin dragged himself further up the ladder of alertness. "Yes," he said, "and you're warm, and I'm licking you." It was exasperated, but not at himself; at JC. "So shut up, okay?"

"Oh," JC said, and put his hand back on Justin's skin. He couldn't help but reach for that sense, take a peek, and he was nearly bowled over by what he felt there; concern love worry loneliness stubborn fear love. It made his breath catch in his throat, all the things Justin was feeling and didn't know how to say. Justin was drowsy, swimming in it, the sensation of JC right up against him and holding him, and after a few minutes Justin's breathing evened out again and JC could tell he was asleep.

JC ran his hand along Justin's back and kept breathing, trying not to hope that someday, it would stop being weird.

*

The townhouse was deserted when JC woke up the next morning, and by the bright red digits on the clock next to the bed, he knew he'd slept a good long time indeed. Joey had left him a note on the kitchen table -- back when they'd all been sharing a house and getting up in each other's face every time they turned around, they'd learned how to hide from each other, each of them alone in the house even with the others there, and communicating via notes had been an important part of that learning process. It brought back a small rush of nostalgia, of early Orlando summer sunshine and waking up to find Chris and Joey long gone to work for the day.

The note told JC to start with the book that still had the bookmark in it, and added that there were fresh pastries in the oven so they'd stay warm for him no matter what time he woke up. JC smiled at the addition, "And we're taking Justin out to dinner tomorrow night to celebrate the listening party today, so don't make any plans." It would probably be good for him to get out and do something; he couldn't hide forever.

He brought a mug of tea over to Joey's desk with him, picked up the book, and started reading. He was too cold, though, so he turned off the air conditioning and opened all the windows; the first bite of fall was in the air, even in the middle of the city. It was a quiet neighborhood, mostly free of the city noises, and what little of them there were faded into the background quickly enough.

And then his phone rang. JC had left it in the other room, still in the back pocket of the jeans he'd dropped next to the bed, and he caught it just before it went through to voice mail, not having time to check the caller ID. "Yeah."

"JC." It was Diane; she sounded tight and nervous. "Do you have some time this afternoon?"

JC frowned and sat down on the bed. "Yeah. I just woke up, I don't have anything else to do. What's up?"

"Do you have a pen and paper?"

He rummaged around the bedside table; sure enough, Joey, ever practical, had left a pad and pen in the top drawer. "Yeah, shoot."

"1145 West 88th Street, apartment 1415. How quickly can you be over here?"

JC checked the clock, automatically; half past two. "Thirty, thirty-five minutes? What's wrong?" Why did you call me when you were so sure I didn't have a part in it three weeks ago?

"We've found where the sorcerer was staying when he was here in the city. It's been abandoned, and it feels like he's not coming back, but there are some things I'd like you to take a look at."

"Okay," JC said, and then something occurred to him. "Wait. How did you know I was in Manhattan?"

"I always know when there's a Magus nearby," Diane said, and hung up the phone.

JC didn't bother taking a shower, just ducked his head under the faucet of the bathroom sink to try and tame his hair, and then pulled on the first clothes that came to hand. He hesitated at the door, wondering what Diane needed him for, wondering what he should bring and whether or not he'd need any of his supplies. Finally, he said fuck it and grabbed his backpack anyway. The worst that could happen would be that he'd have to haul it with him. The cabbie he got wanted to talk, and he was too busy trying to deflect the conversation to worry about what he'd find when he got there. It wasn't until just before he arrived that he realized what Diane had called him.

There was a man leaning against the building, scrutinizing all the comings and goings, and he tipped his head up and started walking forward when he saw JC. He was small -- barely five six, JC thought -- and lithe and silver-haired, probably somewhere in his mid-sixties. "You're JC?" he asked, as he came close.

JC looked around automatically, waiting for someone to recognize him, waiting to feel someone tap him on the shoulder and ask for an autograph. "Yeah," he said, warily.

The man nodded and held out his hand for JC to shake. His grip was firm, but JC got a sense of solidity from it. Brusque, no-nonsense, but competent and cohesive. "Paul Reis. Diane sent me downstairs to wait for you."

"Sure," JC said, and squinted against the sunlight to try and get more of a glimpse of what was lying underneath the man's skin. He was well-shielded, but JC felt no malice, only brisk impatience. "What's going on?"

"Come on up with me," Reis said. His fingers flicked briefly between them, setting up the spell that would make people's eyes slide over them. Lance had been the one to teach it to his mother, Lance had said once; JC wondered if Diane had taught it to this man, or if he'd already known it. JC had met some holy magicians who knew a great deal of sorcery, and some who knew next to none. The doorman looked right through them as they walked into the building, and the elevator doors nearly closed on JC's heel as they went in.

The door to apartment 1415 was half-open, and JC could smell the stink of black magic halfway down the hallway. He stopped short. "Fuck," he said. "The door -- you can't leave it open like that." He could only imagine how poorly the others who lived here would be sleeping, plagued by nightmares. "Didn't you clean it up?"

Reis looked startled. "Clean what up?" he asked.

JC pinched the bridge of his nose. "The magic. God, it's like swimming against the current in a sewer just to walk up this hallway."

"I can't feel that kind of magic," Reis said, shortly. "I'm not sensitive to it at all." JC caught the unspoken thought that no one who wasn't working black magic should be that sensitive to it.

"Okay," JC said. "Hold on. I'm not walking in there until we get this contained, at least."

"Don't disturb it," Diane said, poking her head out of the doorway. There was a smudge of something that looked like ink across her cheek. "Not until you take a look at it. We are so totally over our heads here that I don't even know where to start." JC could feel her, too, a stressed and frazzled line frayed just a hair too thin.

JC paused as he was starting to reach out and start in on the containment spell. "So you called me?" he blurted.

Diane sighed. "What I said to you three weeks ago was true at the time, but apparently it's not true now. Lance told me -- Well, it's not important. What's important is that someone has to come in here and see if they can figure out what's going on, and that someone can't be me or Reis, because we just plain don't know what I'm looking at." Reis, still standing next to JC, didn't say anything, but JC could feel his reaction, the way he refused to believe that anything was over his head. Great. Not enough to be dealing with dead people and a possibly-far-too-powerful sorcerer; he was apparently also going to have to deal with an ego, too. "And you might not either, but you're the only person I could think of -- aside from Lance, of course -- who has the potential to even possibly understand this."

"All right," JC said, and slid the backpack off his shoulder. He was glad he'd brought it; he pulled out the canister of salt he'd taken to carrying with him and drew boundaries on the floor, right at the edges of that black cloud of magic-stink. Diane watched him politely as he stepped into the middle of the area he'd cordoned off. "You guys might want to be on this side of it," he said. Reis and Diane stepped over the lines without breaking them. He held out his hands and sang to himself: Adonai menath-chelqiy vekhosiy 'attahtomiykh goraliy.

It was the first Hebrew he'd spoken since the morning he'd woken to find something new sleeping underneath his skin. The words slid off his tongue the way they never had before, like breathing, like his own heartbeat.

"Shit," Reis said, directly to Diane, when JC had finished. "You didn't say he was nearly as powerful as Lance."

"He wasn't," Diane said, still blinking against the flood of JC's magic.

"He's right here," JC said, more than a little pissy, and stepped inside the apartment.

He only barely noticed the decor, something pale and spartan and, actually, vaguely like something he'd seen in one of the decorating magazines his people tended to leave where he would notice them in the hopes that he'd be inspired to do something with his house other than just put stuff in it. The minute he walked into the room, he knew unpleasant things had been done here. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the sense of things, taking in the thousand miscellaneous tricks and booby-traps that had been left in the apartment's very furniture.

"Did you touch anything?" he asked Diane over his shoulder. "When you got in here, I mean."

"No. I walked in, took one look around, knew enough to know I shouldn't touch anything until someone had taken a look at it." She pointed. "Nearly walked into the strangulation trap set in the doorway further into the apartment, but Reis caught it about three seconds before I did. We tried taking down one of the non-lethal ones, and it backfired on us --" That would explain the ink on her face, then, and the faint odor of sulfur in the air. "That was when I said we were just going to wait for someone else to get here."

Layers upon layers upon layers of protections -- not passive protections, the go-away and don't-enter-here that blocked things both mundane and magical that JC used, but a more active and ugly set, some of them potentially lethal. He noticed the ward Diane had pointed out, and frowned. Once he knew what it was set to do, it was plain, but he wouldn't have recognized it for what it was meant to do without her.

JC began to see the problem. "Jesus," he said. "I've never seen wards this bad."

Reis frowned. "They're not wards," he said. "They're traps."

JC blinked. Couldn't the man see it? They were constructed like wards were, acted like wards did -- they just had an extra payload to them, the kind of thing that was meant for active rather than passive deterrence.

Diane saved him from having to explain. She squinted, tilted her head to one side, and then cursed under her breath. "No. He's right. They're wards. Take another look at them, look again, look closely this time -- they're wards. Which was why when we tried to get rid of the one we managed to identify, it blew up on us, because we were treating it like a trap, not like a ward." She shook her head. "Dammit, how could I have missed that."

"You were expecting what you usually find," JC said. He knew that was the truth, could tell it the same way he'd been able to tell so many other things. "And I'm not expecting to find anything, so I can see what's really there instead of what my head wants me to see."

"Damn," Diane said. "I really want to get into that other room and see what he was doing here."

"Me too," JC said, and sat down on the floor, after checking beneath his feet to make sure nothing unpleasant would be triggered by his presence there.

Reis raised an eyebrow. "Campfire sing-along time?" he inquired, archly.

JC was really beginning to dislike the man. He was also beginning to realize why Lance had spent so long warning him about magicians and their egos. "No," he said, as pleasantly as possible, "I'm trying to see if there's any way that I can take these apart or defuse them. Or at least figure out what they're all supposed to do. So if you wouldn't mind giving me, like, ten minutes of peace and quiet?"

"Go ahead, JC," Diane said. "I'll keep watch for you."

It took JC a second to realize what she meant -- that she would watch over his body while his attention was outside of it, the way Lance had said JC would one day be able to do for Lance himself. He'd never had someone to do that for him before, and Lance had never bothered. It would take some time before he got used to the idea of doing something quote-unquote properly, instead of five minutes' warning with a lick and a prayer. "Yeah," he said. "Don't touch anything. I'll try not to fuck them all up."

He didn't wait for a confirmation, just closed his eyes. In and then out, and he didn't need to open his eyes again to see the room, as though he were standing next to his own body and able to see in perfect panoramic view. He was standing next to his own body; he could look down and see himself, spine straight, breathing even, eyes closed.

Disorienting, but he could deal with it. Vaguely, he wondered if this was one of the things he was supposed to tell Lance he was suddenly able to do, because he'd never even thought of doing it before, and then dismissed the thought. Diane and Reis were dim glows of light, heavily shielded with their own personal protections, and he looked past them and spent a long time just studying the room.

It was mined with traps; JC was surprised neither of the other two had set anything off by accident, just by misstepping. Heaviest around the far wall, with a concentration around the door, as though whoever had lived here had wanted to make sure no one got through there. JC counted a few dozen just where he could see, each pulsing a dull and sullen color. He was very careful not to move until he'd located them all.

The simplest, most basic one was on the floor halfway across the room; a faded rune that was designed to alert the apartment's owner if anyone who had not been introduced to the apartment's protections stepped across it. JC studied it for a long moment, trying to work out its logic, trying to see how much of a range it had. Not far; it was designed to work inside the apartment only. That was good; it meant wherever the man had gone, it wouldn't alert him to the fact that there was someone else poking around his apartment.

Cautiously, JC knelt next to it. Knelt with his spirit-self, at least; suddenly he realized that his body, his real body, was about fifteen feet behind him and in another position entirely, and for a minute his concentration wavered. He stopped and held on to it, as hard as he could. For a brief second he thought he felt the fleeting touch of Diane's power brushing across the outer layers of his protections.

It passed. Maybe it passed by itself; maybe whatever Diane had done helped it along. JC held one insubstantial hand over the pattern on the floor and willed his attention through his fingers, exploring the way it worked. He'd seen things of the same type before, the second or third time he'd gone out on his own, but then he'd only been looking to break them down, not understand them first. This one defied understanding. It was complex and intricate, not anything JC had ever seen before, but after a few more minutes looking at it, he started to see its inner logic.

And logic it was. Genius, really -- brilliant work, and he wasn't too distracted to realize that much. The former inhabitant of the apartment had used two or three different frameworks as a blueprint, pulled them all together, but the final work was something JC had never imagined -- and, he thought, he probably wasn't the only one. This line to define the boundaries of it, that line to set up the consequences, this one to --

He opened his eyes. "I know how to get through them without letting him know we've been here," he said.

Reis snorted. Diane leaned forward. "How?"

JC pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to think through it. Slowly, carefully, logically -- if he made a mistake, there probably wouldn't be enough time left over to even realize the mistake had been made. "The whole thing's set up to keep this place safe. These aren't the kind of things he'd take down and put up whenever he walked in and out; they're supposed to be here, and they stay here when he's in or when he's gone."

"That's unusual all right, but I'm not sure how you think that's going to help us." Diane frowned.

JC really wondered if everyone in the world was so used to seeing what they were looking for that they couldn't grasp logic when it hit them in the face. "So, two things. One, the way to get through all of this without leaving any sign that we were here is to convince the wards that we belong -- that we're supposed to be allowed through without anything bad happening to us." That should have been obvious, the minute that he started thinking of them as wards, but it had taken looking at them for the solution to become clear. Diane was frowning; he thought she probably hadn't really grasped the fact that what they were dealing with were wards at heart. Then again, he thought Diane was probably used to taking wards down rather than leaving them in place and working around them.

"Yes," she said. "If you can re-tune them so they'll let us through, and then re-key them behind you when we leave --"

JC could see the exact second when the second half of it hit Reis. His eyes went wide and he hissed. "And that means you've got his power-signature, because the wards have to be keyed to it in the first place. "

"Yes," JC said. No matter how much their unknown adversary tried to strip his sense of self out of every single piece of magic he worked, something like this -- wards designed to deliver very unpleasant surprises to everyone but a few select people -- had to contain those power-signatures built into them, so that they would be able to 'recognize' their master.

"That's --" Diane started.

"Ridiculous?" Reis suggested. "To think two low-level magicians and a half-trained Magus who got the power through blood magic could break down something done by someone who's so clearly powerful enough to do something like this?"

Diane shot him a glance. "I was going to say 'inspired', actually." She turned back to JC. "What do you need us to do?"

JC was starting to get a headache again -- sometimes he thought it was going to be his natural state for the rest of his life -- and he could feel his temper fraying. "Why are you suddenly so willing to accept that I know what I'm doing?" he asked.

Diane made a tiny gesture born of frustration. "I told you, JC. I have no problems with you personally. It's simply that I didn't think it was your job, and this is the sort of thing that should be done by the people who are supposed to do it." She sighed. "And from what Lance told me, and from what I can see written across your face plain as day, it is your job now, and I'm sorry I've made you distrust me this badly, but you have to understand that I'm just looking out for the people I love and the job I have to do. And you probably don't know what you're doing, but you walked in here and took one look around and could see the things Reis and I both missed, so I'm not stupid and I'm not too proud to admit when I'm wrong. What do you need us to do?"

JC caught himself wondering what Lance's home life had been like during puberty. He fought the urge to laugh, and then remembered a promise he'd made. "I think -- it'll be easier for me to just re-key these for one person, not for three. Can you guys --" bugger off and leave me alone so I can work in peace and quiet without someone staring over my metaphorical shoulder "-- go and pick up some lunch or something, maybe take a walk around the block, talk to the guys down at the desk and see if you can find out anything about the guy who lived here?"

"Lived?" Reis asked. "Sure looks like he still lives here to me. A man doesn't just walk out and leave all of this behind."

"No," JC said, thoughtfully, and frowned. He couldn't tell how he knew, but he knew. "He's gone; he won't be back. Or if he is, it won't be for a long time. He's -- not running, not scared --" No, that wasn't it at all. "Fuck. He's got whatever he's been setting up almost ready. He's gone to try and fill in the last missing pieces."

"Then we work quickly," Diane said. "Open the door when you're done. If we're back before then, we'll just stay out in the hallway." She paused. "Will we be able to get through the barrier you set up out there?"

"Yeah," JC said absently. "It's not physical, it just contains anything that comes from this apartment and keeps it from spreading --" His mind was already on the best way to handle things.

"All right," Diane said, and pulled Reis out the door with her. It shut behind them, and JC was alone.

He pulled out his phone. "You'd better be there," he told it, and hit memory two. It rang twice and then Lance answered.

"I'd say that this had better be good, because it was a hell of a day and I was three-quarters asleep, but if you're calling me it's going to be good, so hit me with it."

"Your mom and her friend Ð whoÕs a bit of a jerk, by the way -- found the guy's apartment. I'm sitting on the floor right now."

With proper provocation, Lance could hit almost the same notes that Chris could. "What? What the hell --"

JC was actually enjoying this, in a way. "The whole place is mined with some sort of booby traps that are half ward, half bad spell. I think I've come up with a way to get around them, but I was hoping you'd be able to poke at the idea with me and tell me what I'm forgetting to think of." Briefly, he outlined his plan, and Lance didn't interrupt except to make the occasional "mmm-hmm" noise.

"Sounds solid," Lance finally said when JC was done and Lance had taken a minute to think it through. "Tough to pull off, but solid. I don't like saying that without seeing them, though."

"Yes, well. Since you're in Russia and I'm in Manhattan, I don't really think that's going to happen."

"Well, yeah. Anyway. From what you're saying, some of those constructs are very subtle, and I'd be surprised if there weren't a thousand misdirections and false clues in there. See if you can find something portable, something you can take with you, and work on it somewhere safe. Shielded and warded to the roof, I mean, so if anything happens and you accidentally set it off, it won't bomb an entire block. If you want, you can go over to my place and use my workroom."

JC sighed. He'd been afraid of that, but he also felt like they were close, so close, and running out of time. Lance seemed to catch his hesitation -- perhaps the connection ran both ways -- and added, "I know. I don't want anyone else dying if I can help it, either, and I don't want to let this guy get one bit more powerful than he already is, and I don't want to take the risk of missing whatever he's trying to do and having to clean up after it -- but you have to work carefully, because if you set that stuff off by accident, I don't know what will happen."

"It's the dying part that I'm worried about," JC said. "Because I'm getting the sense that the reason he's not here anymore is that he's gone out looking for the other people he needs, and I'm worried about two things. One, I've only managed to catch him three times, and I don't know how many other people have died because of him, in places where I wasn't, or in places I don't even know about. And two, this is a really big country, and he could be anywhere."

"If you can get his power-signature out of those wards, we'll have a place to start looking," Lance said. "And -- I should have done this three weeks ago, but I'm going to get in contact with someone I know over at the FBI. Sorcerer; not a very powerful one, but he knows about the magical world and he doesn't quail at slipping me some data every now and then. We'll see if the FBI is tracking this guy's victims at all."

JC closed his eyes; he was dizzy, and he couldn't tell why, and it was easier to deal with the dizziness if he didn't have to see things. "Sorcerer. In the FBI." Lance seemed to hear the doubt in his voice, and laughed.

"Hey, sorcerers have to pay the rent too. It was either that or Bunco squad in New Orleans, busting fake fortune-tellers and leaving the real ones alone. Which is actually what he used to do -- Anyway. I'll call Nguyen, and have him send along anything he's got. You, work on those wards. If you need me, for anything --"

"I know," JC said. "Call you."

"I will come home, you know. If you need me. When you need me."

"You've only got three more weeks," JC said. "Don't fuck it up now." He didn't say that he wanted to prove he could handle this on his own, without Lance.

Maybe Lance heard it anyway, because he sighed. "Okay. Find something portable, get out of there before you go nuts from the itch of the magic --" JC wondered how Lance knew that it was driving him nuts. "And tell my mom I said hi, okay? Love you."

"Love you too," JC said automatically, and hung up.

The closest thing to portable that he could find was one of the knives on display in a glass cabinet on one wall; it was warded too, but it wasn't as bad as the others, and JC got the impression, looking at it, that it had been early work, less complex than some of the later structures their enemy had devised. No ward on the door to the cabinet, oddly enough; it was simply locked. He worked it open, slowly, slowly, teasing the lock to come undone with a steady hand designed to leave no traces of his passage behind it. This was sorcery, and it was harder work than he thought, working without leaving a signature behind him, and he was sweating when he was done.

And then he laughed, because when he had the cabinet open, he could study the ward on the knife more closely, and could see what it was designed to do to anyone who disturbed it. Impotence spell. Subtle and long-lasting, intended not to protect the man's property but to take revenge on anyone who dared to touch it unbidden. JC shook his head, plucked a length of silk from his backpack (bright pink; if you needed silk to contain hostile spells, to insulate yourself from touching them, it might as well be a color you liked) and wrapped the knife in it.

Diane and Reis were waiting in the hallway when he opened the door. "Did you --" Diane started, and then frowned, studying JC. "Did you get anything?"

"Not here," JC said. "I can't work in this place. It's too creepy, and this is going to be way too delicate. I found something portable; I'm going to take it home with me and see what I can get from it."

Reis was leaning against the wall. "You want us to just leave this place alone? All this magic, just waiting for him to come back to it and use it again?"

"Yes," JC said. "I cleaned up all of the traces of us that I could. If we're lucky, very lucky, he won't notice we've been here. If I can figure out how to re-key the protections, figure out how to get through them and get further into the apartment, we'll come back. Until then, if he comes back, I don't want to let him know that we know where he lives." He stooped and touched his fingers to the lines of salt on the hallway floor, taking up just a pinch of it, and then stood up again. "Stand back."

They did. He held out one hand, palm up, and brushed the fingers of his other hand together, sprinkling the salt onto his hand. Selah, reach and pull, and he pursed his lips and blew, scattering the salt in a quick puff of breath. The net he'd constructed of salt and magic dissipated; a slight breeze ghosted through the corridor.

JC tested the way things felt with the doorway closed behind them, whether or not he'd managed to sweep up enough of that miasma that it wouldn't be a danger to the other inhabitants of the building. Good enough, he finally decided; they might lose sleep, but nothing that would send any potential sensitives into spiraling depression. He scuffed at the lines where the salt had been with the tip of his foot, making sure that the last few grains of it that hadn't been caught up in his spell were scattered enough, and looked up. "Don't come back here, and don't let anyone else. This is our only connection with him right now, and I don't want to risk losing it to someone who's going to sweep in and decide to play cleanup crew."

"You can't just leave this," Reis said, sounding affronted at the very idea. "You can't find something like this and just let it sit here. What if this is where he's coming back to? What if this is where he's planning on doing whatever he's got in mind? We have to break it down; it's our only chance to destroy what he's doing."

"And if we do that, he's just going to move somewhere else and do it again." JC shook his head. "I can't -- I can't explain it. It's just an impression. He's too determined, too caught up in it -- there's no way that just taking out one of his places would stop him, and if we do that, he'll know. We wouldn't stop him. We might not even slow him down. And I'm going to be honest with you, there's no way we can afford to tip our hands this early in the game."

"What if he does come back, though? " Diane asked. "If you want to leave the apartment undisturbed, you can't even put a warning on the door to let you know if he comes back."

"No," JC said. "He'd notice that." He strode off down the hallway, and threw over his shoulder as he went, "But the door isn't the only place I can leave it."

The elevator's emergency stop button worked as designed, and JC brought the car to a halt between the ninth and tenth floors. Diane and Reis had followed him, out of curiosity in Diane's case and wariness in Reis's. It was harder to work in a small space with two other people there, but JC pushed the incipient claustrophobia firmly aside and knelt to press his palms against the floor of the car.

It was harder than he'd been expecting. He was still slightly dizzy, slightly disconnected; the magic he'd worked back in the apartment, in the hallway, had really taken it out of him. The problem with a spell like this was that you had to be able to keep it all in your head at once. This to set up the boundaries, that to warn him if anyone with magical talent stepped into the elevator, this to keep it from being noticed -- link it to him, but indirectly, so he couldn't be traced from it, maybe, hopefully, unless someone was willing to go through a great deal of trouble --

When he finished, breathing heavily and seeing spots behind his eyes, Diane was looking at him oddly. "Where did you learn how to do that?" she asked.

"I don't know," JC said, and pulled himself up with one hand on the wall to start the elevator back up again.

*

JC packed when he got back to the townhouse and spent twenty minutes trying to find the cheapest last-minute flight back to LA. He should have just taken something, anything, but he was actually sort of enjoying the chance to sit and worry over something that wasn't at all related to dead people or weird magic or anything more important than which airline would get him the most frequent-flier miles.

Just as he was about to book the flight, his phone rang. It was a number he didn't recognize, an area code he remembered as being from D.C., and he debated letting the voice mail catch it, but thought better at the very last second. "Hello?"

The voice on the other end, deep and rumbling, was nearly too much for his ears. He thumbed down the volume. "Yes, my name is Michael Nguyen; may I speak with JC Chasez?" He almost managed to get the last name right.

"Speaking," JC said automatically, and wondered if the reporters had found his private line again. He really didn't relish having to change his number.

"Mr. Chasez --" More correct that time; almost there. "A friend of yours asked me to call and give you some information, under the rose, so to speak."

Oh -- Lance's friend from the FBI. JC hadn't been expecting the call so quickly. He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair. "Yes. Yes, if you have anything."

"We do. I didn't catch the case, though I tried for it -- my colleagues tend to leave things of a more, shall we say, esoteric nature on my desk -- but I've been doing what I can to support it. And I'll tell you, I was very glad when our mutual friend told me it had been brought to the attention of the other authorities as well, because there's something about this one that makes my skin crawl. If you can get down here so I can give them to you in person, I can get you the files -- it'll take a few strings pulled, and if you let anyone know where you got them from I'll have to string you up by your toenails, but if anything I have will help you, it's my duty to pass it on."

Well. It looked like JC was going to see the FBI. "D.C.? Yeah. Yeah, I can get down there tonight, meet up with you -- tonight? Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow afternoon is probably best. I don't want to promise immediate delivery, not until I can talk to a few people. Here, take down this address and phone number." JC did, then read it back. "Call me tomorrow between two and three. I'll have more information for you then."

"Okay," JC said. He wondered how Lance had met this guy and why he was willing to help JC out with no questions asked, then stopped and wondered how his life had gotten so bizarre that he was making a clandestine appointment with a FBI agent to pass off files he could probably be arrested for having. "Thanks."

"It's everybody's problem," Nguyen said, and hung up.

The last flight to Dulles left in two hours. JC booked it, left a note for Joey and Justin, and called a cab to take him to the airport.

That night was more books. He woke up in his hotel room the next morning, spent the morning on Hebrew practice and the afternoon with more books, and Nguyen over dinner in a little Thai place that had very good food and was, apparently, used to weird things. Nguyen turned out to be in his mid-thirties, of Asian descent; he was about JC's height, dark and slender and intense, and he recognized JC the minute he walked into the restaurant.

Nguyen was the one to cast the concealment spell; he seemed to work through incantations and symbols, and he had to start it over twice when his fingers twisted wrong before finally getting it. "Sorry," he said, with a rueful smile. "It's been a long week."

"Hasn't it just," JC said, thinking of the way he'd been kneeling next to a dead body four days prior and hadn't stopped moving since.

"This is what we have so far," Nguyen said, and handed over a fat manila folder. "Fourteen deaths, total. There are three others in the case file, but I think you'll know which ones I'm not counting when you see them. They don't have the same feel to them. The home office has been treating it like another serial killer, and I'm afraid the on-site investigators have no magical sense whatsoever, so there isn't even any unofficial and internal gossip about that end of things. But you might find something in here that'll help, at least. It can't hurt."

JC's hand hovered over the edge of the folder, but he didn't open it. Not yet. Not until they were done eating, at least. The wait staff wasn't giving them any dirty looks, but he didn't want to spoil his appetite. "Do you think you guys have any chance of finding him?"

"Honestly?" Nguyen shrugged. "Not unless he screws up, and screws up badly. He's clever, and he's fast, and he's using magic fast and furious to keep his tracks hidden. You're far more likely than we are to find where he is."

"I'll be honest with you." JC looked up from his plate and met Nguyen's eyes. "If I catch him first, I don't think I'm much inclined to turn him over to you guys."

Nguyen nodded. "I'd have to call you crazy if you did. I need to spend a few weeks chasing after another case I'm working on, but if you need our assistance, call me, not the police. I'll be able to get you somebody who knows the score."

Flying ate up most of his day, but JC used the time on the plane to go through the file Nguyen had handed him, ignoring the sideways glances of his seat-mate in first class on the flight to LA. Let the man think he was researching a role in a film. As predicted, he knew immediately which three incidents to discard; they didn't have the same feel to them. He studied the reports, the photographs, until they slipped and scrolled behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes for a moment's rest, and none of it brought him any closer to understanding.

His house hadn't had the time to take on the closed-up, musty feel that a house gets after a period of disuse, even with Carlos gone. He flipped on lights as he went, hauling his suitcase up the stairs, and then he took a shower and grabbed something to eat. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

JC's body was still on New York time -- he'd spent his life training himself to take as little notice of timezones as possible, to sleep when it could and wake when it needed to, but the first day after travel always messed with his schedule. He woke up the next morning feeling like he'd slept for a few days, but the clock reassured him it had only been ten hours. There was a message from Joey waiting for him, telling him to check his email; JC made a mental note, and deleted the message.

JC found breakfast, though nothing would quite compare to the pastries Joey picked up every morning from the place down on the corner. There was a folder sitting on his counter; he glanced at it, figured it was probably something of Carlos's, and ignored it. He dumped his dirty clothes in the laundry room, where the housekeeper would deal with them on her next visit, and dug up a fresh package of underwear from the drawer, just to have them on hand. He contemplated going for a run, because with all the things that had been going on for the past few days, he hadn't gotten a chance to keep to his usual morning routine, but he decided against it; it was just too much trouble, and he still felt tired, like he'd just gotten back from a tour. He called to confirm the benefit party he was supposed to go to on Saturday night, and checked his calendar -- something in Miami Beach next Friday, and then Miami over the weekend, he'd have to make sure to make the travel arrangements now if he wanted any hope of getting a decent --

He stopped in the middle of the kitchen, his hand on his day-planner -- it had been a gift from Lance for Christmas, and honestly, JC wondered how he'd gotten along without it, he should have been using one years ago, Carlos was great at telling him where he needed to be that day but usually forgot to give him warning more than forty-eight hours in advance, and really, he liked to plan things more than just a day ahead, because --

Think, dammit. Focus.

Something in the back of his head was screaming.

Maybe his manicurist would have room for him while he was out here. His nails were starting to look a little ragged. He picked at a cuticle that was starting to tear and then put his fingers in his mouth, worrying at it with his teeth. The sudden tiny flare of pain pushed through the haze in his head, and he thought, with sudden chilling clarity, This isn't right. Something's horribly wrong here.

He fought the nausea down, hard, and something in the pit of his stomach made him take the stairs two and three at a time. He'd left his cell phone upstairs, and it took him a minute to find it. On the bathroom vanity table, next to the toothpaste. He hefted it in his hand and tried to remember why he'd wanted it so badly. Who he'd been going to call. Surely the manicure appointment wasn't that urgent --

It rang. JC shook off the reverie and looked down at the display. Lance. "Yeah?"

"JC." Lance's voice was soft and urgent. "I need you to do something for me."

JC's eyebrows drew together. "Sure. Anything you need, you know that."

He couldn't tell why Lance's voice was so worried, so calm. He knew that tone; it was the tone Lance used when he was speaking slowly and clearly so someone understood him, the tone Lance used when he was terrified about something and didn't want to admit it. "I want you to go sit on the floor of your spare bedroom, okay? Bring the phone with you, but nothing else. Just go sit there and breathe for a couple of minutes, okay?"

JC laughed. "Breathe? I'm breathing right now. You know, oxygen, necessary for life, etcetera."

Lance didn't laugh. "Favor for me, okay, Jayce? I promise I'll explain in a few minutes. Promise."

It couldn't hurt to humor Lance. JC did a lot of humoring Lance. "Sure." His feet padded against the hardwood floor of the spare bedroom. He stopped when he reached the center of the room and turned around, puzzled; when had he moved the furniture out of here? "Okay. I'm in the spare bedroom. Now what?"

"Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Don't move." The quick, clipped commands didn't sound like Lance. "Close your eyes and don't think of anything. I'll explain in a few minutes, but I'm going to hang up the phone now. Just wait."

"Sure," JC said, still humoring Lance -- sometimes you just had to do things for the people you loved, even if you didn't understand them. Even if they sounded like they were madmen. Maybe Russia was starting to get to Lance. The phone in his hand clicked, and he closed it and set it down on the floor next to him as he sat down with his legs crossed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling silly. Maybe Lance was trying to get him to take up yoga. He'd been kind of contemplating yoga for a while, but he'd never really made the time to learn it. He had time now, though, didn't he? They were on hiatus, and he didn't have anything better to do. Maybe it would be good for him to learn some kind of --

The world went black.

*

In a tiny bed in a tiny room halfway across the world, Lance pulled his t-shirt over his head and threw it over his face as he lay down, draping it over his eyes to block out the last bits of the afternoon sunlight. Calm, calm, you fucking idiot, how could you have left him to -- no, calm, you won't be able to do anything if you're panicking. He breathed deeply and arranged himself on the bed, careful to avoid any position that would lead to cramps or numbness. He didn't know how long he'd have to be gone.

It took him longer than he'd hoped to arrange his thoughts in some semblance of calm, longer than it should have before he could summon the detachment necessary to focus his attention inward and find the small thread of connection that would always and forever be there. He called to the part of himself he'd given away -- willingly, unstintingly, with open eyes and without looking back, and it was the fact that he hadn't begrudged the giving that let him reach out for it now. Something crawled underneath his skin like spiders, and he blocked it, ignored it, concentrated. It was buried deeply, flickering raggedly like a candle that had used up almost all its air, but it was there, and he summoned all of the power he had to hand.

JC, he thought, and then reached out with both hands, and for the first time in months, he was whole again.

It was like spreading aloe over a sunburn: cool sharp shock, and then the relief of pain he hadn't even realized that he had. He could stay there forever, holding on to that piece of himself he'd thought was gone. Before he could lose sight of what he had to do, Lance threw himself down that line, followed it along to the other end. Before he could start to remember.

It took him a few minutes to catch his breath once his -- JC's -- no, his, his at least for these few moments -- eyes opened. He was the wrong shape, the wrong size, looking out from behind eyes that saw the world in colors and shades ever-so-subtly wrong. He could taste JC there, the faint and mysterious feel of JC's hands, JC's body; his breath caught in JC's throat and then slid down into JC's belly. He ran his hands over JC's thighs, feeling them shaking, feeling the way they felt like someone else's hands but obeyed his own directions, feeling the faint but ever-present ghostly awareness of JC's sexuality, sensuality -- oh, he'd never realized, not until he was here and felt the way the clothes felt so soft and comfortable against JC's skin, the way he wanted to touch himself and see what it felt like for someone else --

Focus. Focus, dammit.

It took Lance a second to figure out how to move; his center of gravity was in the wrong place, and the only thing that saved him was the fact that the body he was wearing was so used to obeying what was asked of it, was so intimately familiar with how it moved and how it all worked together, that it knew better than he did how to keep from falling over. Lance felt like a little kid again, clumsy and uncertain. He swayed back and forth for a minute, trying to find his balance, trying to find how to stand without falling, and then he took a deep breath and resolved not to move again until he had to.

Faint and sluggish traces of JC's power were there, sleeping, underneath the magic trying to part JC from it. Lance's own power; it recognized him, reached for him, came to his hand and like a faithful hound wanting to know why it had been abandoned. But more than that; there was another feel to it, spicier, newer, feeling the way JC tasted. Lance reached out a metaphorical hand for it and just brushed it with his "fingertips", taking its measure.

It recognized him, too, father mentor brother lover teacher part-of-self, and Lance opened himself to it, coaxing it gently. Some surprises there, some things he had never seen before -- no time, no time, later he would map its depths and try to determine what JC had been given, what JC would have been if he had been born to it. Lance turned to the piece of himself that slept behind JC's eyes and called it to heel.

Piece of himself it was, but it was a whole, complete in its cross-section, like a fractal. And Lance had been using it for a great deal longer than JC had. He whispered to it, woke it, roused it from its complacency, coaxed it through the barriers and the blocks -- JC had learned to use the power Lance had given him, but not the way Lance knew it, not the way that Lance could address every inch. He used it now. He wore JC's skin, had thrown himself into JC's semblance, but he was not JC; the enchantment skittered around his edges, whispering to the parts of him that were JC, the parts of JC that were himself, but Lance had fought things stronger and it would not have JC. The fire he called didn't burn in any way the physical world would have recognized as heat, but it cut through the stink of magic around JC. With it loose, Lance could breathe more freely.

Not his body, not his skin; it didn't want to obey him, but he fought the worry that he was too late, fought the fear that JC hadn't been able to make it to the overworld properly when Lance had thrust him from his own body. What Lance had done was violation of the worst kind, but it had been his only option. He might already be too late. He'd taken the risk, and he could make amends later, and he didn't care if JC hated him as long as JC was conscious enough to sustain that hatred.

Find it first, to see what it was. It was on the front door. A subtle bit of magic, and one Lance might not have noticed if he hadn't been looking for it. One piece to bring amnesia, another to block anyone who touched it from his magic. Subtle and devious and, given enough time, deadly. A mage couldn't survive without his magic. Lance reached out his/not-his hand and rested it on the back of the door. The spell swarmed under his fingers, reaching out its tendrils for him/not-him, then pulled back, satisfied that it had already claimed this victim.

"Wrong, fucker," Lance said, and blew it to pieces.

He was shaking by the time his head cleared; he fell three times, and had to crawl up the last few steps. The body -- JC's body, keep sight of that, remember -- was realizing its usual tenant was gone. Lance divided his attention as best he could; this part to making JC's body obey him, bring him back to the workroom, that part to holding onto the power as much as he could, reaching through the blocks the way JC couldn't have done, the way only an intruder who had not been touched by the magic could have done. He made the last bit of the journey on his hands and knees, and didn't bother trying to prop himself up once he got through the doorway back into the shielded workroom.

Concentrate, Lance told himself, and closed JC's eyes, reaching inside and feeling the alien evil wrongness placed between JC and his magic. It was more than the work of a minute to untangle it; it had sent a thousand tiny tendrils through JC's very core, penetrating and insinuating itself, and Lance had to keep a thousand details in mind as he searched them out, because he couldn't afford to leave so much as one. He caught the last one just as his concentration began to falter, untangling it from where it had made its home, and as he cupped it in mental "hands", he flung himself free.

The overworld waited for him the way it always did. Grey and shapeless, an endless plain of nothingness, sky and ground just a few shades apart. The ground was covered with a thick, roiling mist, like a dry-ice fogger gone horribly awry, clinging up to his knees. The landscape here fit itself to what people expected to see. Given some of the things that lived inside Lance's nightmares, he always forced himself to see nothing more than this.

Here, in this world, the magic he'd brought with him took on physical form; Lance looked down at his hands and perceived it precisely as what it was, some kind of parasite, thick and grotesque and still searching for some home. He dropped it on the ground -- the mist retreated from its touch, as though even this projection of Lance's thoughts did not want any more contact with it than absolutely necessary -- and he plucked a silver dagger from nowhere with a whispered word, plunging it directly through the middle of the thing.

"I suppose I have to say thank you," came the voice from behind him, and Lance turned around to face JC.

If the landscape here changed itself to fit what people expected to see, people fitted themselves to what they looked like inside their own heads. JC was a little taller, a little broader across the shoulders, quietly luminescent with inner radiance. Lance could feel the war inside JC, gratitude mingled with a cold simmering anger. He understood it. He'd have felt the same.

Lance stood up from where he'd been crouching. In the physical world, it would have caused his knees to protest. He wasn't as young as he'd used to be. "I won't apologize," he said.

"You knew, didn't you." JC's voice was flat. "That you'd be able to do that. You knew from the very beginning that you'd be able to follow that piece of you if you had to."

Yes; he had. Lance had known from the very beginning, from the minute he'd first spoken of his plans, both what he was giving up and what it would get him in return. He didn't bother to lie. "I'd hoped I would never have to."

"You did it to save my life," JC said. "The minute you kicked me out of my body I could see what was going on. He knows I'm after him, doesn't he. And he took steps to make sure I didn't get in his way."

"Yes," Lance said. Just that; nothing more.

The mist pulled back from JC's legs, swirled around him. Lance caught a flash of it, through their connection, through the link they'd always have and that he'd never thought he'd have to use: anger, hurt, JC's vague and tiny feeling that he'd been violated -- well, really, in a way he had been, and the fact that there hadn't been any other way didn't make it any easier. "We really have to talk, you know. About you telling me what you're doing. About what you're thinking of doing, and what you know, and what you're not telling me. Information sharing goes both ways."

Lance was tired, so tired, and he knew if he looked down at himself he'd be fading to transparency. It was such a long way back home. "I know. Jayce, I know, I didn't have any other choice. I felt it happening, felt something was wrong -- you would have died. Hate me for doing it if you have to, but I didn't have any other choice."

"I don't hate you," JC said. Lance thought he looked distant, detached, simmering with such a terrible beauty it almost made Lance's eyes hurt to look at him. "I might not like you a whole lot right now, but it doesn't change the fact that I love you. I feel dirty, but it's not you. Or at least, it's not all you. Just -- for the love of all that's holy, if you ever do that again without warning me first, I will break all the bones in your fingers. Now go home. You're barely even a ghost."

"Be careful," Lance said. "I don't know if I'd have the strength to do this a second time."

"May God grant you never have to," JC said. "I can find my own way back. Go."

Both of Lance's legs were asleep when he opened his eyes again and clawed the t-shirt off his face, suddenly feeling like he was suffocating. He curled up in a little ball, feeling the agony of returning circulation, and just shook for a few long minutes.

Shit.

The stakes suddenly seemed a hell of a lot higher.

iii. i need to feel it when the rain starts coming on

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