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

It took three days before JC could so much as think of touching his magic again, and every second ticked by like an eternity. The insides of his head felt raw and bruised, aching, and he kept feeling like if he turned his head too quickly, he might fall out of his body and back into that grey nothingness Lance had shoved him into.

He worked through it by ignoring it, or as close to ignoring it as he could get. He moved slowly and kept reading, because he didn't have anything else he could do, and five or six times a day he could feel Lance's touch ghost over the edges of his awareness. Checking up on him. It pissed him off, and it didn't matter that he knew why Lance was doing it. He resisted the urge to grab that touch, shake it like a dog would shake a towel in its mouth, and send it back home with the sense of ask first.

JC did trust Lance, would probably trust Lance until the day he died, but he was starting to realize all the things about Lance that he'd never seen before, the thousand tiny flaws he couldn't see until he'd known enough to look for them. Like the way Lance was always certain that he knew what was best. JC could only imagine what had caused that, what had shaped that. They'd thought they all knew everything about each other, but Lance had been keeping quiet about huge swathes of his formative experiences the whole time, and they'd somehow never really gone back to fill things in, afterward.

JC got the impression that Lance had spent so long desperately trying to hide what he was doing from anyone who knew anything at all about magic, so they wouldn't tell him it was impossible or try to stop him from breaking tradition, that he was just out of the habit of discussing what he was doing with anyone. At least, he hoped that was the problem. That could be dealt with, given enough time.

It rained the day after JC's unexpected excursion to the overworld. Grey and foggy, like the landscape in that other place had been. Whenever it rained in LA, he got a headache. Something about the fronts, or the weather systems, or the fact that half of California was a fucking desert reclaimed by modern engineering. JC stood at the kitchen window just after dark, leaned his hand on the windowsill, and looked out at the rivulets of water streaming down the glass.

Something snapped. "Fuck you," he said, before he realized he was talking.

The window didn't answer him. He should have felt like an idiot, talking to himself, but he didn't feel like an idiot and he wasn't talking to himself. The rain was warm against his skin when he pushed the door to the deck open and stepped outside. No, he didn't step. He charged. "Fuck you," he said again, tipping his head back to the sky. The drops of water licked against his cheekbones, cascaded down his neck. His shirt soaked through in a minute.

The sky didn't answer him. He hadn't been expecting it to. "Fuck!" he said. Shouted. His voice was spiraling upward, louder and louder, until he might have been waking up the neighbors and he didn't fucking care. "It's not enough for you that I'm doing this? It's not enough for you that I'm giving it everything I've got, everything I am, everything I possibly can? You've gotta throw the rest of this shit at me? Fuck you, fuck, I said. I said I'd do it, I said I was in, you have to keep trying to manipulate me?"

JC never yelled. He never yelled, and he rarely lost his temper, and even when he lost his temper it was never like this. He tipped his face back further and ignored the way his eyes were stinging in the rain. "What do you want from me? What more do you want? What am I not doing that you want me to be doing? Fuck, I can't read your fucking mind, you have to tell me!"

The night was quiet, in that way nights are quiet when everything's holding its breath and waiting for something to happen. "Fuck," JC said again. This time it was quieter. "I don't want this. Not like this. I don't want it. Take it back."

Nothing answered him. He wasn't sure which was worse: the thought of something answering him, or the thought of nothing but silence. He went inside and slept. If he dreamed, he didn't remember.

His phone rang a few days later when he was trying to figure out what to wear to the charity thing. It was Chris, he realized, looking down at the display, but he was too tired to think of some witty way to answer the phone. "Yeah."

"I'm beginning to think," Chris announced without preamble, "that Lance is a sociopath."

This should be good. JC adjusted the phone against his ear -- that was the one problem with cell phones, they kept wanting to slide off your shoulder, and he hadn't seen his hands-free hookup in a month of Sundays -- and pulled out a few more shirts to add to the rapidly-growing pile on the bed. "Are you now."

"Doesn't mean I don't love him. But really. See, Lance told Joey what happened -- well, more accurately, Joey wormed it out of him -- and Joey told Justin, who's still just as freaked out as he has been, so Justin told me, seeing how I'm the only sane one of us left, and now I'm calling you. Are you okay?"

"A little dizzy," JC said. "Sociopath, Chris." He was used to shaking the verbal leash and reining Chris in.

"Yeah. Like, a benign and totally non-pathological sociopath, if there is such a thing, but still. I mean, look at all the criteria. Claims he's working by some other set of rules that nobody else can really understand, check. Does things without thinking of the consequences they're going to have on other people, check. Justifies his actions by saying he had to do them, check. If you really want to be technical about it, you also have to factor in the claims to be listening to the voice of God thing. Them's big sociopath points right there."

"It's a good thing I know you're kidding." They all used that phrase a lot with each other, but especially with Chris. JC squinted against the rush of dizziness and decided to temporarily abandon the getting-dressed thing. He sat down on the bed, then slid over sideways to lie down and prop his head up on the pile of clothes. "Where are you?"

"Some little fleabag motel somewhere in west Texas. Which is, by the way, possibly the most overrated piece of our glorious and hospitable country that I've ever been in. If I never see another cactus again in my entire life, it'll be too soon. I didn't call to give you my travelogue, though. Justin says that Joey says that Lance thinks you're mad at him."

"Jesus," JC said. "We have spent entirely too much time in the presence of screaming fourteen-year-old girls."

"Silence," Chris said. "I am performing the ancient and time-honored ritual of Being The Go-Between Between Two Stubborn Fucks. I am not being a fourteen-year-old girl."

"Hey, if the shoe fits." JC pulled a shirt out from under his head and squinted at it. Sure, why not. He tossed it to the side; he'd get dressed when he got up. If he got up. The bed was awfully comfortable. "I'm not mad at Lance. A little irritated. Not mad."

"He's worried about you," Chris said. "I don't really understand what happened. And that was not an invitation to explain it, because I'm still quite content sticking my fingers in my ears and singing la la la la I can't hear you, thank you very much. But he's really thinking that you're not talking to him right now, and if he keeps thinking that, we are going to venture into fourteen-year-old girl territory, so will you just call the sociopath already? Bonus points if you manage to talk him into taking a vacation when he comes home in two weeks."

JC suddenly missed Chris something fierce. "When are you coming home? If west Texas hates you so much, I mean."

"I'll be back for my birthday party. You fuckers are throwing me a birthday party, right?"

"Is it going to be a repeat of last year?" JC didn't want to think about Chris's thirtieth birthday party. It had involved a great deal of tequila, and the basic equation of Chris's relationship with drinking was "tequila == naked". Still, JC had been kind of fond of Chris's drunken speech declaring that, despite his loud protestations leading up to the party, thirty was not the end of his life but the beginning of a new phase of it, in which he would embrace peace, inner light, and understanding, and no longer be known as Chris but as Moonflower. Chris's nickname in his email address book was still "Moonflower Tequilasbane".

"As long as you keep me away from the tequila, all will be well. I'm serious, C. Call Lance. I warned you this was going to fuck with your head, but I'm not going to let it fuck with the group, too."

"Yes, Mom," JC said.

"And be sure to wash behind your ears and eat your vegetables."

"Yes, Mom," JC said.

"And get your feet off the bed. Were you raised in a barn?"

JC blinked. His feet were on the bed; he picked them up and hung them off the edge, quickly. "How'd you know my feet were on the bed?"

Chris laughed. "Your feet are always on the bed. Love you. Call Lance."

"Love you too," JC said, and hung up the phone.

JC went to the charity party and told anyone who asked that he wasn't drinking because he was on medication that made him really dizzy, which also served nicely to explain why he wasn't dancing. He knew he'd fall over on his face if he tried, and wouldn't that make a nice picture for the wire services. He didn't eat or drink anything while he was there, and if he'd thought he could do it without having to listen to Michael Jackson jokes, he would have worn silk gloves so he didn't have to touch anything, either. The space between his shoulderblades itched, as though someone were taking aim at him.

He came home and sent an email to Lance: "Chris says you're a sociopath. Not sure, but I think it was a compliment. Call me with details of your flight home or something, so I can make sure to be there at the airport." It wasn't an apology, but it didn't have to be; he didn't really have anything to apologize for, despite feeling vaguely that he did. Lance wrote back with "I think Chris is probably the sociopath, but don't tell him I said so. Flight details to follow when I work them out. They're talking about April launch now." They didn't talk about the rest of it. JC hadn't mentioned his shouting match with the universe the other night. He wondered if Lance had ever had a similar one. If the universe had answered him.

JC didn't go out unless he absolutely had to. He didn't open the door of his house without pulling on gloves, and he didn't drive any of his cars, and he kept looking over his shoulder and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Two days later he was finally able to touch his magic without needing to bend over and put his head between his knees, and he started in on untangling the wards around the knife he'd taken from the apartment. It took him a few days -- twelve- and thirteen-hour days just sitting, his back and thighs screaming at him by the time he finally came out of the light trance and realized that he still had a physical body -- before he could even get past the first layer. Just when he was starting to get the hang of it, he had to fly back out to Florida for more appearances. At that point, he figured he might as well move into his Orlando house for the duration; if he was very lucky the guy didn't know about it. The LA house had better working spaces and most of his supplies, but it didn't feel like home all of a sudden, and he was tired of constantly worrying that someone had managed to trap him again.

The one advantage of being in Orlando was that there were fewer people trying to drag him out to do things; most of the people he hung out with on a regular basis lived in LA, which was why he tended to stay out there. He took an afternoon to move all the furniture out of one of the bedrooms he wasn't using and cleanse it, top to bottom, hauling out all the bells and whistles -- okay, all the holy water, sea salt, incense, and candles, but it really was the same thing at heart -- to make sure it was as clean as it could be before he built up the protections. He'd started to ward the whole house a while back, and been slightly amused at the time to discover Lance had already taken care of it (years ago, from the way the magic felt; probably when JC had first moved in), but he didn't want to do any real work now without making sure the protections on his working area were as solid as he could make them.

The day before Lance was scheduled to finish up his training, JC finally managed to pull apart the ward. It was late afternoon and his stomach was telling him he'd missed breakfast and lunch and it would really appreciate dinner soon, thankyouverymuch. He watched the dust-motes dancing in the beam of sunlight for a minute, tried to fit all the pieces together, and then reached for the phone.

He'd woken Lance up; he could tell that much from the deep slurring sound of his voice. "Jayce? What's wrong?"

"I broke it," JC said. "The wards. I broke it. I've got the signature."

Was it only the faint memory of Lance that let him feel the flavor of Lance sitting bolt upright in bed and running one hand through his hair? Or was it the thousand mornings of seeing the same thing, in buses, in hotels, on green room couches, on most of the furniture in each others' houses. "You what?"

"I wouldn't have called if it wasn't important. I broke it. I've got the signature out of it."

Lance paused. "And?"

JC wondered how Lance knew there was more to it than he was saying. He wondered if that connection would always be there, or if it was simply a side-effect of the connection from the night when Lance had walked in his body for a while. He wondered if he'd ever be sure, ever again, whether a thought was Lance's or his own.

"It's not just one signature." JC took a breath. "It's two."

*

"Okay," Lance said. There was a scraping noise from the other side of the phone, and then a thud. Probably Lance making coffee to wake himself up some more. JC winced, imagining what kind of final exam Lance was going to have to go through in the morning, and almost wished that it had taken him another day to get through things. "Okay. Go over it all in as much detail as you can manage."

"Hang on," Joey said. They'd conferenced him in at JC's suggestion, because JC had a distinct feeling they were going to need someone on research duty. "I've got an idea. Go over it from the very beginning. All of it, back from when you first got called in to handle this, and don't leave anything out. I've got the feeling we're missing something really obvious, and maybe hearing it all in order will help."

"Okay," JC said, and leaned back on his pillows. His back was killing him. "It started back in New York. Your opening night, Joey. I was sitting in the club, and I had this nagging feeling that something needed me, but it was really faint and unspecific. I got up and followed it, dealt with what I was being called for, and when I was going home I felt the radar going off again. That's when I found the first one. The little girl."

"The calling for that other one wasn't anything urgent, though. Nothing like what happened later." It wasn't really a question; Lance already knew. JC frowned and tried to think back. "No. It was really faint -- I thought at the time it was just that I wasn't used to listening for it. But that wouldn't have been it, would it have been? I mean, I'd gotten calls before, and I hadn't had any problems following them."

"What if it wasn't really your problem yet?" Joey asked. "What if it could have been, but it wasn't really, so you were sort of getting the -- potential vibe of the problem, but it wasn't really something you were supposed to be dealing with yet?"

"Maybe," JC said, and rolled over. The file he'd gotten from Nguyen was sitting on his bedside table, and he picked it up and flipped through the summary sheet in the front. "The FBI file I have thinks it was the first case. They hadn't gotten any other reports of anything fitting the description before that, at least."

"Which doesn't mean there weren't any," Lance pointed out, "just that the bodies haven't been discovered yet, or they couldn't pinpoint the time of death. But it's a possibility. Okay. So you dealt with cleaning up after that one. What kind of impression did you get from the girl?"

"I didn't have a long time. Not at all. It was a pretty decent neighborhood, and the neighbors must have heard something -- the police showed up a few minutes after I got there. I barely had time to clear out the magic the guy had left behind him." JC closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the memories. "There was a lot of fear and pain in the room, and a lot of magic, but the magic had been stripped of anything identifying. I thought at first that she'd been some kind of human sacrifice or something, in one of the blood-path traditions that does that stuff."

"And then you came home and gave the notebook to me," Joey said. "And I went for some of the books, and I pretty much couldn't find shit on the symbols the guy had been using, and that really confused me, because I should have at least been able to figure out what tradition they were. But I did find a little bit of something that looked familiar, in one of the really old books, and that was what made me start to think maybe we were dealing with someone who was trying to take power from other people."

JC frowned. "But I don't remember noticing that the girl had any power at all. And she was young. Twelve, thirteen -- that's before it wakes up, isn't it?"

"Usually," Lance said. "It tends to show up around puberty. Maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later. It's possible she had the potential for it, it just hadn't manifested itself yet. Joey, what made you think power-stealing?"

"Reference from the Inquisition, of all things," Joey said. "Someone had written down something about a ritual they'd walked in on, and copied some of the symbols down. Didn't know what they meant, but the person who'd been doing the magic had said it was to increase his power. It was kind of tenuous, but it felt right."

"Okay. And then?"

JC picked it up. "That Sunday night, after I got back into the city, Joey and I were lying around and reading, and I got smacked between the eyes with the need to get the hell out of the apartment and go fix something. Big and strong and not at all like the first one had been; I got the sense that this one was really urgent."

"And I wasn't going to let him go and deal with it alone, so I bullied him into taking me with him." Joey took a deep breath. "Kind of wish I hadn't, really, because I could have lived without seeing it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"That time the guy was older. Magician, but not a very strong one. More of a sense of earth-magic, folk-magic, than anything else. He'd shielded his rooms, and done some work on the building itself to keep everyone okay and safe, but I got the impression that --" JC broke off, and tried to find the words. "That the magic was something he used, but didn't live by. He was just trying to get by with what he had in life, and using whatever little psychic gift he had to make things a tiny bit better."

Lance made a small humming noise. "Could you get any feel of what those psychic gifts might have been?"

"Not once he was dead," JC said, grimly. "Real" magic, sorcerous or holy magic, lingered after the person who had called that magic died; psychic gifts, because they followed a different set of rules, because they were so closely connected to the user's own self, because they were so weak compared to sorcery or holy magic, faded nearly immediately after they'd been used and couldn't be retrieved except by someone who was exceedingly practiced. Lance knew that much, but Lance was one of the people who could probably manage to pick up traces of psychic magic from years before. "Same deal as the last time, though. Bad magic, bad vibes, left behind, but nothing I could get any sort of grasp on. The guy had put up some kind of net around the room. Something to contain everything that was going on, keep people from noticing --"

Except it hadn't been that, had it? JC held up a hand for silence, forgetting he was on the phone and not in person, and thought it through. "The mirror was on the wrong side," he finally said.

"Mirror?" Joey asked.

Lance was the one to answer, just as slowly. "When you're doing something like that, something to keep people from noticing a strong disruption in the power-flow in an area, the wards you build are sort of ... mirrored, on one side. To reflect the area around them. If you don't do that, there's a chance that someone who was looking would be able to see the null spot you'd blocked off. If you set it up so the edges of your boundaries reflect the area they're in, it's almost like camouflaging your work. Anyone who went looking would see a spot that looked and felt precisely like the area around it."

"And that's not what he'd done," JC said. "I didn't notice it. I was too busy trying to figure out what had gone on in there. I didn't notice the net was facing inward, not outward."

"So ..." Joey's voice was slow, as though he were working through it as he spoke. "So the guy had put up something to ... contain what was going on. And the usual way of doing it is to face outward, so nobody will notice? And he didn't do that, he put it facing inward, so..." He trailed off. "So what's the benefit of putting it inward, anyway?"

"I don't know," JC said helplessly. "Lance?"

Lance was quiet for a minute. "To make absolutely certain that what you're raising, what you're dealing with, goes exactly where you want it to go, and doesn't get loose. It's used when you're dealing with things that absolutely shouldn't get free. It's --" He stopped, hesitated. "It's used when you're working with stuff with the potential to go really wrong and hurt a lot of people, so you set it up that way, so if something goes wrong it'll only hurt you and not anyone else."

"So if he's evil," Joey asked, "why does he care?"

JC let the silence stretch out for a minute, thinking it over, and then made a frustrated noise. "I don't know. I cleaned that scene up, and then Joey and I went back to his place. I called Diane the next day, and she showed up and told me to go home, so I did. That was the ... fourth. Fifth. Something like that." He flipped over a page in the file. "The file I'm looking at tells me there were another nine victims from the fifth to the twentieth. There are three more in the file, but the drawings are all different. It's nearly a straight line from Manhattan to LA; eight states. Same descriptions, pretty much the same scenes. I've got pictures. The symbols look like they're more or less identical --" He stopped and squinted at them. "Actually, now that I'm looking at them, there's a little 'less' than 'more', if you know what I mean. Most of them are the same, but there's one section that keeps changing."

"Which one?" Joey's voice sharpened.

"Um. Fifth line down next to the victim's left hand in each picture. It's just a -- a 'sentence' or two. But it's different in each one of them."

"Hmm. Send me scans?" Joey asked. "I still haven't been able to figure out much about them, but if I can find anything, that might help. A lot."

"Yeah," JC said. "Anyway. I spent those few weeks out in LA, bored out of my mind. Cleaned up a few little things while I was out there. Came out to Orlando for some thing, dealt with some stuff while I was out here -- which reminds me, Joey, I need to tell you about your kid's new babysitter later; you and Kel won't be able to see her but Bri's still young enough that she probably will, and I don't want you thinking your kid's going nuts --"

"House-wight?" JC could hear the smile in Lance's voice.

"Yeah. Just another service we offer. Anyway, I went back out to LA, was at some stupid party or another and it went off right in the back of my head, kaboom, next door, and I got over there as fast as I could. I had to break the house wards in order to get in, and that fucking creeped me out, because --"

It was apparently a night for sudden realizations. "Because if the guy had managed to get through the wards without leaving any trace of his passage behind him, he had to have been invited in." JC stopped. "Because the second guy had wards up too, and those had been broken. Whoever we're dealing with knew her."

"Pass that on to Nguyen," Lance said. "He'll be able to get the list from the local cops, of her contacts and her usual acquaintances. It might help them out a little bit."

JC nodded and scribbled a note to himself. "So. I broke the wards, got in. It was the usual scene. Body on the floor, symbols all around, drawn in blood and oil, big thick cloud of blood magic all around the room. I didn't have my notebook, so I couldn't write down the symbols, and I didn't have any of my stuff with me, because, you know, wasn't expecting a dead body to turn up right next to the party I was attending. I took a second to check that it was the same type of magic, and then I tried to get the woman's power-signature, because Diane had said they might be able to work with that if I caught it, and so I knelt down next to her and was trying to reach for it when I noticed she..." He trailed off. It still creeped him out, even two weeks later.

"Something had taken her soul away from her." Lance was trying to be as dispassionate as he could.

JC licked his lips, which were suddenly dry. "Yeah. I mean -- I've seen dead people before. Walked in on dead people before. And never once, not once, have I ever seen anything like that. Usually when someone's dead, their -- their soul's gone, gone off to wherever we go when we die. But she wasn't dead. And it wasn't peaceful like a natural death, or even a death by violence; it was like there was this gaping raw oozing hole left behind where it had been."

"Okay," Joey said. "That creeps me out more than anything else about this, I think, and I can only imagine how much it creeps you guys out, but let's think about it as rationally as we can. Why would anyone want to take someone else's soul?"

"I ... don't know," Lance finally said, after a moment's silence. "The only thing I can think of would be as some sort of revenge against the victim, to pin him or her on this plane after death and prevent them from moving on to the next life. I've never heard of anything that could benefit from having someone else's soul even though the body was still alive."

"Well, the body isn't still alive," JC said, shortly. "So whatever the guy had in mind, I hope I fucked it up for him. I also took apart everything that had been left there. The protections were still up when I walked in, too, which was the first time that happened. Couldn't get any kind of signature out of it. I kind of blew them apart when I was cleaning up. I probably shouldn't have."

"I don't think anyone blames you," Lance said.

"And then I went home, and that was the night I went looking for some clue as to what had happened to her. I had some of her hair. Tried to use it to get some sense of where she'd gone, but all I got was some kind of vision, of this guy. Him in a room, reading or something, and then he looked up and saw me and I was back in my own body again."

"That was the night you had the dream or visitation or whatever it was that kicked you into overload, wasn't it," Joey said.

"Yeah. Which, no, I still don't really remember much of, so don't bother asking, but yeah. Woke up that morning, felt like I was hung over. Justin was sitting on my bed and talked me into coming back out to New York, where I promptly pitched over right on Joey's toes. You guys both know this part of the story; hell, you probably remember more of it than I do, Joey. Joey took some of the overload so I could manage to make it through the airport without going nuts --"

Lance interrupted. "Joey did what?"

JC suddenly felt sheepish. "Oh. Uh. I thought Kei might have told you. Did we forget to mention that part of it?"

"You most certainly did," Lance said.

Joey broke in. "He was suffering from magic poisoning, Lance. What was I supposed to do, leave him there to die of it?"

"All right," Lance said, and his voice was grim and resigned. "I won't lecture. Go on."

JC let out a breath he hadn't been aware of holding. "Anyway. Joey got me down to Kei, he fixed the overload and get me dealing with the new stuff, and I went back and kept reading. Which is, more or less, what I've been doing since. Your mom and Reis somehow managed to find the guy's apartment, and I went on over there to see what I could figure out from it. Not much; the place was landmined from here to hell and gone. Which, you know, is another thing that just doesn't compute, because if it was a holy mage, why would he have been playing with stuff that hostile?"

"Some people do," Lance said. "I mean, I've got my personal space warded pretty heavily, too. Not quite to the same extent, and not with spellwork designed to injure or harm, but -- maybe he's been teetering on the edge for a while."

"Anyway," JC said. "I picked up something portable, went back out to LA so I could work in my workroom instead of in Joey's apartment, and the minute I got out there and walked in my front door, all hell broke loose. Metaphorically speaking, of course." They were all still a little sensitive about hell jokes.

"Which is where I come in," Lance said. "I got the sense that there was something wrong with JC. Sort of like an abbreviated version of the sense that there's something wrong going on nearby, but focused on one of the people I've protected. I checked in long-distance as best as I could, realized he'd tripped a magic-trap, and called him up. I told him to go upstairs and sit in his workroom while I dealt with it."

"And the next thing I know, I'm standing in the overworld and somebody else is walking around in my body."

"I am still sorry about that," Lance said, quietly.

JC sighed. "I know. I know. I told you, I'm not mad. Just... still a little creeped out about it."

"Yeah," Lance said, and there was another apology in his voice. JC almost wished there hadn't been. He could accept Lance's pragmatism, when he had to, but it was somehow worse when Lance felt bad afterwards. "Anyway. Because the spell had affected JC, not me in JC's body, I could break it and fix the damage."

"And then I spent three days throwing up every time I so much as thought about doing magic, doing a hell of a lot more reading, and pretending to all my friends that I'd been hit by some kind of case of the flu. Once that went away, I started working on unraveling the wards on the knife I'd taken from the guy's apartment, and let me tell you, that took fucking forever, especially with having to watch over my shoulder the entire time to make sure I hadn't found another trap."

"And you broke them tonight," Joey said; not really a question, since JC had explained it when he'd called.

"And I broke them tonight. Managed to tease out the guy's power-signature from it, except there wasn't just one signature. That was part of what fucked me up for so long. It's not one; it's two. Really closely intertwined, to the point where I almost couldn't tell them apart, but it's definitely two."

"Okay," Lance said. "Tell me about them both."

JC closed his eyes and reached for the pattern of letters and symbols he'd been holding in his mind. "They're -- complicated. I don't really get much of a sense of personality out of either one of them. Not like the way, for instance, that I could tell what kind of person you are just by taking apart your wards. These are kind of cold and distant -- it's like someone stripped the signature from them when they were created, but had to leave sort of the negative-imprint of that signature in order for the ward to work properly. Or maybe like someone came back and stripped it later. I'm not so much getting the sense of who these people are as who they aren't."

"And who aren't they?" Joey asked.

JC took a deep breath. "Evil. Despite the traps, there is no, and I do mean no, hint of blood magic or black magic. Not at all. Blood magic wasn't used to create it, wasn't used to power it, and sure as hell wasn't part of the magic that was even used around it. If you'd handed it to me and told me to take it apart without telling me where you'd gotten it from, I would have guessed that it was done by someone who works for our side. They're not familiar, either. Neither signature is one I've ever seen or felt before. And admittedly, I haven't encountered everyone, but I've met a lot, you know? Has anyone gone missing lately?"

"Hmm." Lance paused. "Not that I know of. How old is it?"

JC probed that sense of it in his head. "Not very. Maybe six months? No more than a year, I'd say. It doesn't feel stale and out of date the way something older might feel. It's recent enough; I'd almost be willing to call it fresh."

"When you were dealing with the victims, C?" Joey's question was almost tentative. "Could you tell if it was one person or two who'd been doing it?"

JC paused and thought. "I ... couldn't tell you with any absolute certainty. I thought it was only one, but now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know if that was just my first impulse or if it's actually what I was feeling."

"Okay." Lance's voice was decisive. "Here's what we're going to do. C, check the files. The last two victims, the ones who died after the last one you were there for. Where were they from?"

JC flipped through pages. "Another in LA, which happened when I was out in New York. And then one in Seattle. He's slowing down. Picking people more carefully."

"Okay. You get back out to LA and check in on that scene, if you can get in. The cops will have cleaned up, but there's probably still something you can use. Study what was left over, see if you can find either signature in all the mess now that you know what's looking for. Joey, I know you've been looking for clues in all your books, but for now, concentrate on the symbols. I want to know why he's doing this, since we may very well be wrong about what we thought was going on. If you find anything, tell both of us, as quickly as you can."

"Sounds like a plan," Joey said. "You're going to be home soon, right?"

"Yeah," Lance said. JC could hear the disappointment in his voice, the reluctance to give up fighting. "They're still talking about April, but at this point I need to be over there and helping you guys out. I'll deal with all that stuff once we manage to clean this up. My final tests are tomorrow and I was going to fly home after that, but I think I'm going to detour slightly, first."

"Where?" JC asked.

Lance chuckled. "Justin's in London, isn't he? Maybe I'll drop in and see him."

JC could hear Joey frowning. "You're just going to go and do something else while we're dealing with all of this?"

"No," JC said, realizing. "He's going to go see someone he knows out there."

"The one guy in the world who's nearly as powerful as I am," Lance agreed, "even if he carries an entirely different type of magic. It might take me a few days to find him, since he's the type who occasionally has to pick up and move without leaving a forwarding address, but he might have something I can use. C, I'll meet you in Orlando on like Tuesday, okay?"

"Okay," JC said. Part of him hoped he'd be able to crack it before Lance got home, so he could stand on his own two feet and not need the backup. Part of him wanted Lance to stay on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, and not touch him until he got over the sense of being dirty that still lingered under his skin. The rest of him just wanted to rest his head in Lance's lap and let Lance rub the knots in his neck, and he didn't know which part was going to win.

*

JC made the mistake of answering his cell phone in LAX without looking at the caller ID. It was Tony. "Hey, man, you gonna be at the show tonight?"

"Oh, shit," JC said. He'd totally forgotten. "Is that tonight already?"

Tony laughed. "Yes, it's tonight. Today's Friday. You know, the day after Thursday and before Saturday. When was the last time you hauled yourself out of that house?"

"I'm actually at the airport right now," JC said, "just back from Florida," and then inspiration struck him. He couldn't risk going back to his house, not in case someone had managed to get back in and do something to it. "Hey, they're fumigating my house right now and I was gonna hit a hotel or something tonight, but would you mind if I crashed with you instead?"

"Sure," Tony said. "Wanna meet up at the club?"

"Sounds good," JC said, and went to go rent a car.

The address from the FBI file was about half an hour from the city proper, and he got lost three times trying to get there. There was a car in the driveway. JC remembered that the victim had been a seventeen-year-old boy. Mother and stepfather, he remembered, trying to fit together the facts he'd read; he didn't feel like digging through his bags to find the file. Okay. He could work with that; he didn't want to have to wait until they left the house.

When the mother answered the door, she saw what her mind automatically deemed "typical cop". "Can I help you?" she asked. Her eyes were still red around the edges, and she looked like she hadn't slept in days. No wonder, really; if her son had been magical enough to call his killer's attention, there were even odds that he'd inherited the potential from his mother, even if she'd never so much as noticed it, and JC could still feel the entire house crawling with the subtle sense of wrong.

JC smiled as disarmingly as he could. "Ms. --" oh, God, what was the name? He pulled it out of his memory just as he was beginning to panic. "Ms. Benson, I'm Special Agent Scott with the FBI. I'm very sorry to intrude."

She went pale and clutched at the doorframe. "Is there news? Do you have him?"

JC shook his head. "I'm afraid not. Not yet, at least. But we're very close, we think." It always made him feel better when he wasn't actually lying. Better to tell as much of the truth as possible, and let the listener's mind fill in the rest of the details, draw the wrong conclusions. "If you don't mind, though, may I take another look at the room where --" Name, name, he could never remember the bloody names! "--Jeffrey was found?"

"We've cleaned it up," the woman said. "The other detective told us it was all right. After your forensic people had been through." Her gaze was accusing, as though she found it ridiculous that a policeman could come two and a half weeks later and expect the crime scene to be still-undisturbed.

"I know," JC said. "And that's fine; I just want to take a look at the layout of the room. There are some things drawings just don't convey." On impulse, he rested a hand on her arm, broadcasting waves of calming, of soothing, as strongly as he could. She seemed to slump when he touched her.

"All right," she said. "This way, through the living room."

The body had been discovered in the breakfast nook, spread out facing the large bay windows. At least the floor was tile, JC thought, looking at it; they wouldn't have to replace the carpet. The magic had dissipated slightly, but not enough. The mother and stepfather must be at each others' throats, living in a house full of this.

"We came home from the party," she said, standing in the doorway, as though she didn't want to come any closer. No doubt she told herself it was because she didn't want to be reminded, and that was probably part of it. "The lights were on, and we could hear Jeff's stereo upstairs. I called up, telling him to turn it off, but he didn't answer. And then Ron went to go into the kitchen, and found --"

"I've read the reports," JC said, as gently as he could. "You don't need to go through it again." Better to spare her the pain.

She balled her hands up into fists. "Would you like some coffee? I'm afraid I don't have any made, but I'd be happy to put on a pot."

He wanted to get rid of the fetid stink of magic in the house. They were planning on selling the house, he knew; they couldn't face living in it, not after what had happened. JC knew that if he didn't do something, the house would turn over six or seven times in the next ten years, each new family moving in and then leaving when it got to be too much for them, not knowing why, until someone with enough sensitivity moved in and had a cleansing done. He'd been in a few hotel rooms with the same problem. "I don't mean to make you stand here with me, Ms. Benson," he said. "You shouldn't have to keep looking at it. Why don't you just go upstairs, and go back to what you were doing, and I'll let you know when I'm ready to leave?"

She warred with herself for a minute, not wanting to leave him alone but not wanting to be any closer to it than she had to. JC turned up the emotional broadcast and threw in a healthy dose of "trustworthiness". Finally, she nodded. "All right. Just call up the stairs when you're done."

Left alone, JC pulled up a chair, sat down in it, and folded his hands. He tried to look as though he were studying the room and thinking, in case anyone else came in, and then reached out and touched --

Still there. Still powerful, though nowhere near as powerful as it had been on the other scenes; two and a half weeks had diminished it somewhat. Like the others, these wards hadn't been set up to keep people out or away; they'd been set up to keep something in, to keep something contained, and they'd been opened to let the man out when he was done but not demolished completely. JC picked his way through one of them, much faster now that he'd gotten the sense of their construction, and had his answer in a few minutes: only one signature. Only one hand in things, the one of the two he'd identified as male. The other one had been feminine in a way he couldn't define.

He was somewhat limited in what he could do, with other people in the house and without any of his usual props, but he traced a few quick lines in the air and sang a soft line under his breath. Couldn't sweep it out, couldn't break it, not without having more time, so he gathered up as much of the crawling magic wrongness as he could and --

Damn. Nothing to dump it in. He thought for a second and then fished around in his pocket, pulled out a quarter and shoved the residue into it as quickly as he could. If he had a physical focus for the magic, something to transfer its touch into, he could take it with him and deal with it later. He was just in time, too, because the mother's footsteps clicked through the hall a minute later. He'd known she'd turn around the minute she got out of his range of emotional broadcast and her natural suspicion came back.

"I thought of something else I didn't tell the detective, Agent ... Scott? " she started, then stopped in the doorway and frowned. "Did you open up the blinds in here? It seems so much brighter."

JC concealed a grin. So she was sensitive, at least a touch. He felt suddenly better about having lied his way into her house; at least he'd given her back something. "You should probably call the police detective who was working on your case," he said, and stood up. "They'll be the people who can best handle new information. I was just here to see if I could ... get a sense of what had happened. Thank you. You've been very helpful."

"I," she said, but JC was already standing and offering his hand.

She took it automatically, and JC used that one brief contact to work something complicated: she would forget he'd been there, about ten minutes after he'd left, and she would sleep easily and peacefully that night. He wished he could figure out a way to spell her so she carried the same peace and calm to her husband when she touched him, but he hadn't mastered viral magic yet. Getting rid of the magical residue in the house would have to be enough. "If we know anything, we'll be in touch," he said, and made his escape.

JC checked his watch as he backed out of the driveway and made his way back down into the city. Lance would be on a plane, with his cell phone off, and Joey was probably either on stage or ready to be. He left messages for them both with what he'd discovered and headed off to Tony's show with a significantly lighter heart.

*

JC's doorbell rang well past midnight three days later, when he'd just been ready to close the book and head to bed. He peered warily through the security hole, because it paid to be careful when you're famous even if you don't have some unknown sorcerer after you, and then opened the door when he saw who it was; his wards had blocked the feel.

"Hi," Lance said. There was a duffel bag at his feet, and he looked tired and only a little hung over. "I didn't tell you to come get me at the airport because I wanted to get some sleep before I saw you, just in case one of us said something that would piss the other one off. And then I got home and dropped my stuff and I couldn't stand knowing you were so close. And I'm sorry I'm an over-controlling know-it-all shit, and I'm sorry you have to go through all this, and I'm worried sick about you and I don't want to let you so much as breathe without me standing behind you making sure someone hasn't poisoned your air, and it's not because I don't trust you to take care of yourself, it's because I love you and if anything happened to you I'd never forgive myself for dragging you into this and then abandoning you to go off to Russia for my own selfish reasons. Can I come in, or should I go back to my house and pretend to sleep some more?"

Maybe Lance could read minds after all. "Don't be stupid, jackass," JC said, and pulled the door open further to let him in.

*

"Jet lag of massive proportions," JC said, trying to keep his voice down out of habit. He shut the refrigerator door. On the other end of the phone, Joey chuckled. "Plus I think he ran into something big and ugly when he was looking for his friend in London. I suspect Justin also did some evil and unspeakable things to him involving rum and beer at the very least, and possibly also handcuffs and chains, but I'm not asking about that part of it. He's sleeping like the dead."

"Not like Lance to sleep this long," Joey said.

"Yeah, well." JC grinned. "He's not the only one who can pull heavy-handed, for-your-own-good moves. I knocked him out before we went to sleep, and if he's lucky, I'll wake him up in time for dinner. If he's not lucky, I'll wake him up tomorrow morning. He needs to rest; I don't want him trying to do anything in the state he was in last night."

Joey laughed again. "God, I'm so glad I'm nowhere near the two of you right now. I really don't need to be in the middle of a game of Quién Es Más Macho. How are things going for you two?"

"Eh," JC said. "They're going. We talked last night. Not much." Lance had been too tired to stay awake for long. The minute JC had touched him, the minute they'd touched each other, there'd been that boundary-dissolving dizzy echo of each other again. They'd curled up next to each other in the bed, chastely dressed and leaving just a few inches of space between them, but neither one had really wanted to sleep apart. JC wondered how long it would be before he stopped being wary of touching Lance. If he'd ever stop being wary of touching Lance. He'd wished for a minute, last night, that they could go back to the days when it had been just about mutual comfort and physical pleasure. If it ever had been, on Lance's end.

Joey didn't seem to know anything about all of that; then again, Joey was really good at seeming to ignore things, until all of a sudden he surprised you out of the blue with something you'd thought he'd missed. Like: "The two of you should be careful you don't disappear into nothing, gazing into each other's belly buttons, or something like that. Anyway, when are you planning on getting up here and taking on that apartment?"

"What's today," JC asked, "Tuesday? I want to let Lance get at least one more good night's sleep. Really, Joey, you wouldn't believe how ragged he is right now. I think it's Russia plus jet lag plus whatever he had to deal with while he was over in London. I don't really have that sense of urgency about all this anymore, not like I was having before. I think we'll be okay if we come up Friday night after we're done recovering from Chris's birthday party."

"Fuck," Joey said, "that's this week. I almost forgot. Fuck, and I really would have liked to be down there."

"Eh," JC said, "you've got obligations and stuff. We'll have a party with the five of us the next time we're all in the same zip code. Or even the same area code. Anyway, any updates on the musty-old-book situation?"

"Still old, still musty," Joey said. "Adam sends his regards, and says he's sorry he hasn't dug out the cookie recipe he promised you. Nothing really more to report. I thought I might have found something in the book the store threw at me, but it's really vague, so I'm still looking."

"Let me know," JC said. "I'm going to go make sure Lance is still breathing. Love you, okay?"

"Love you too," Joey said. "Give Lance a kiss for me."

"Still breathing." The voice came from behind him as he hung up the phone, and JC whirled around, pressing one hand to still his racing heart. Lance was squinting at him owlishly, bare-chested and rumpled. "Remind me to have a word with you about your methods of therapy. I didn't need to sleep that badly."

"You shouldn't be awake yet," JC said. "I made sure of it."

Lance shrugged. "Sleep spells don't work on me for very long. My body just kind of throws them off. Kind of sucks when I really need 'em, but in the long run, I guess it's better for me. Did I hear you tell Joey we'd go up there on Friday night? And do you still have any coffee?"

"Over there," JC said, pointing. "It's cold, though. I was going to dump the pot and make another if I woke you up tonight. And yeah. Next logical step seems to be, now that I've finally gotten through the wards, to get back up to the apartment and get through the ones there, see if we can figure out anything about this guy. A name, at least. If we get a name, we can give it to your FBI buddy and let them figure out the best way to get hold of him."

He braced himself, waiting to hear Lance's disapproval of this plan, but Lance only shrugged, pouring himself a mug of coffee and dumping sugar into it. Lance held his hands cupped over the mug and whispered something under his breath, and JC felt the answering flare and catch in his own chest as he caught the quick taste of Lance's magic. He wondered if he'd always feel it so sharply. It was awkward, having Lance there. Close enough to touch.

Lance sipped the suddenly-warm coffee and hitched himself up to sit on the counter. "Probably the best course of action at this point. I doubt we'll ever know what he was trying to do, not without finding, I don't know, a journal in which he makes his secret confession, but I'd be just as happy knowing he's in the hands of the cops. Assuming one of us can get in to see him and make sure he stays in the hands of the cops, that is. Are you sure you'll be able to get us through the wards?"

"Not really," JC said. "I mean, I can try. But I'm not positive. I was going to suggest you take a look at the one I still have here, maybe see if you had any suggestions on the best way to handle it." He kind of hated to ask; he would have been a lot happier if he'd been able to present Lance with a complete and cross-referenced guide to the things they'd find. It would have done better for his own sense of competence, at least. But there was a time and a place to indulge that, and this wasn't either.

"Might not be any more able to deal with it than you are," Lance said. "Wards aren't really my thing. I'll be happy to take a look, though."

JC sighed. "This feels so weird."

Lance raised an eyebrow. "What does?"

"Being face-to-face. Being able to look at you. Being in the same room with you. Knowing you're there to bail me out of things if I get really stuck, knowing you're there to notice if I really fuck something up. Last time we were working together like this on something was -- well, it was that night, and before that, you were in charge and I was just there as another pair of hands and a backup power generator or something."

"Jayce." Lance set the coffee mug aside. "I'm not here to take over from you. For one thing, you're right, however much I hate to admit it; I am exhausted, and I shouldn't be doing anything that requires close concentration or a whole lot of power for a few days, at the very least, and this is going to require both. For another thing, this is your show. You're the one who's been following it all along, you're the one who knows what he's looking for, and you're the one who's got the sense of it. Nobody else in the job caught so much of a whiff of this one. Whatever it is, it isn't our usual jurisdiction, and for whatever reason you seem to be sensitive to it, and that means I'd no more try and control this than you'd try to fly a -- than you'd try to take over my investment accounts, or something."

JC winced, because he knew Lance had been about to say "fly a space shuttle". Lance was hiding it well, but it was still eating at him, JC could tell. "I'm just worried," he said. "What if I fuck it up?"

"Welcome to the question that haunts me every waking moment of my life," Lance said. JC winced, because he should have thought about it, but on the other hand he was tired of tiptoeing around Lance and his Sacred Obligations. They were JC's Sacred Obligations now too, and it would have been nice to have some backup. Or at least some sympathy. Lance was still talking, though, and JC let it go. "Now, I think I would murder for some decent pizza. I haven't had any in months. I'll buy."

*

They spent the next two days working with the wards on the knife JC had taken from the apartment. He'd dismantled the "payload" on the trap as soon as he'd managed to understand it well enough, so any accident wouldn't result in an embarrassing personal problem that would take a few weeks at least to clear up, and then he walked Lance through the bits and pieces of the ward's composition. "God," Lance said, around midnight on the first day, "I can see every inch of this clear as day, and I can't figure out what a single line of it does. How did you manage to get through this without tripping it?"

That both warmed JC up -- from Lance, that was praise, and it had taken him a long time to recognize it for what it was -- and made his blood run cold, because he'd been cherishing a secret hope that Lance would come home, take one look at things, and make it all go away. As much as he would have resented Lance for doing it. "Patience," he said. "I sat with the thing for ... God, it must have been ten, eleven days."

Lance shook his head. "I would have given up after a day of it," he said. "I'm almost ready to give up now."

"You're just not used to dealing with things that can't be solved by throwing a metric ton of power at them," JC said. He realized as it came out of his mouth that it was the truth.

Lance's mouth twisted wryly, and he linked his arms together over his head and stretched. "Yeah, yeah. Guilty as charged. I told you that you'd be better at dealing with things that require patience than I am. I never have the time to pick things to pieces; I whack 'em and get on out."

"Well, I don't think that's going to work this time," JC said.

"Yeah, I know. So. This line is the bit that powers it, and this line is the -- the what? Go over it with me again."

They worked until their eyes were crossing, and then they fell into bed and slept, still not-quite-touching. JC woke dimly when Lance climbed out of bed, opening one eye to see him making his way over to the shower. "Time's it?" he asked.

"Around nine. Go back to sleep."

"I'm up," JC said, and sat up. "Why're you?"

"When we've finished dealing with all of this, I'll teach you how to get by with only as much sleep as is absolutely necessary. I'm serious; go back to sleep. I'm going to go and read over some of Joey's notes, and then we can get working again."

"Okay," JC said, and did.

When he woke again it was just past noon, and he could smell the coffee. He yawned, polled his body to see whether or not it really was done sleeping -- the answer was apparently "yes" -- and hit the shower to wash away the last fragments of sleep. Lance was sitting in the kitchen, just finishing up a conversation; he said "Dasvedanya" as JC walked in and then shut the phone.

"Coffee's still kind of fresh," Lance said, and pointed with his chin.

JC grunted and poured himself a cup. Lance had apparently gotten used to far stronger coffee over in Russia, because the coffee had been made with about three more scoops of grounds than JC generally liked. He added some extra milk and collapsed into the chair across from Lance. "Friend of yours?"

"My counterpart in Moscow," Lance said. "Twenty-eight, redhead, stacked, and about as queer as I am. Nice girl. She called to make sure I got home okay. Joey called, too; he thinks he's on to something. Found a hint in, of all places, one of the Nag-Hammadi scrolls that didn't make it out for public consumption."

JC wasn't at his sharpest, pre-coffee. "Huh?"

Lance just looked at him. "Nag-Hammadi. The cave they found in Egypt with all the Gnostic texts that hadn't survived the early Christian book-burnings."

"You are speaking English, right?"

Lance sighed. "I really have left out entire crucial bits of your theoretical education. Okay. First, second century, there were a whole lot of things being written down about -- well, a whole lot of things. Mostly what had survived of old Egyptian magical practice and made its way into Christian awareness. The Church didn't like that information being widely available, and around the fifth century or so, started a huge campaign against what they called 'heresy'. We lost a lot of what they knew. It might have survived within the Church itself, but Kei and a few other people who are more highly placed than he is say there really isn't much even in the Church libraries."

"Uh-huh," JC said, and grabbed the box of powdered donuts.

"So some people had managed to preserve it and pass it down from generation to generation, and we've kind of got their remnants today as a bunch of contradictory and puffed-up self-important ritual magical orders. So pretentious that they spell magic with a k, you know the type. They didn't get a whole lot of it right, and what they were left with was pretty fragmentary, but up until the 1940s or so, they were all we had left."

JC's mouth was full of donut, so all he could do was make a little "go on" gesture when Lance stopped and looked at him expectantly. He really hated Lance's habit of pausing every few sentences to make sure his audience was still with him.

"So in the '40s, someone found a cave that had a whole bunch of scrolls from back before the church tried to suppress that information. A lot of it was theology, no real practical applications, but there were a few scrolls that had some of the old magical theory in them. There were a series of misadventures, which would almost be kind of funny if they weren't so sad, and by the end of it, one of our guys had managed to get his hands on the texts that really shouldn't be in public hands and pulled them out of the collection. They've been circulating underground ever since."

JC swallowed. "And Joey managed to find 'em."

Lance nodded. "Yeah. Somehow, don't ask me how. I don't think I really want to know. And he found some stuff in there that he says looks a lot like the symbols we're dealing with. It's apparently some kind of bizarre combination of Egyptian magic and Sumerian magic. He's having some trouble with the translation of it; he's given it to his book guy, whatsisname --"

"Adam," JC said. He wondered how well Adam and Lance would get along. He'd have to introduce them this weekend.

"Yeah. He gave it to Adam, who's trying to find someone who's vaguely fluent in Sumerian and knows how to keep his mouth shut. He'll call us back if he's got anything."

"Sounds like a plan," JC said. "I wanna try practicing with the wards today. See if I can manage to re-key the one we have to let us through."

Lance nodded. "I figured. Ready when you are."

It was when they were settled in JC's workroom again that Lance said, "Actually, before you start playing with this thing, lemme try something."

JC raised an eyebrow. "I'm frightened of those words, coming out of your mouth. In fact, I think that's almost more scary than Chris saying he has a plan."

Lance shuddered theatrically. "Nothing in the world could be scarier than Chris saying he has a plan. Except maybe Chris saying he has a cunning plan. No, it's nothing like that. I just wanna --" He settled down, cross-legged, making himself comfortable. "We haven't done anything together yet. To each other and near each other and around each other, but not with each other. I want to know we can, in case we have to."

JC raised an eyebrow. "What, you're worried that all of a sudden we'll get in the middle of things and have to stop for some kind of territorial pissing contest or something?"

"No, not that." Lance shook his head. "It's just always a good idea to practice before you do, you know? And the sense of you has changed a little. A lot. Since, well, you know. C'mere." He held out his hands, palms up, waiting.

JC sighed. "Stubborn motherfucker," he said, but it was affectionate, and he arranged himself opposite Lance and let his hands hover half an inch over Lance's. "What, do you want to just try to --"

They touch, the way it should be, the way it always should have been. Hands clasped firmly in the dark night of the soul, and as their power shifts and merges, it rearranges itself. So long apart, so close together now. They'd done what they were supposed to do, but oh, that didn't mean it had been easy, and now it's like coming home. Two become one; one glories in the uniting, swims in it, drowns beneath the radiant exuberance, the sheer strong right of how it feels, and then reluctantly splits itself back into two, for human souls cannot bear the union for so long.

But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

"--light a candle or ... oh God." JC felt like he should have been nauseated, because that was what he'd felt after all the times something reared out of nowhere and hit him between the eyes, but instead he just felt calm and -- full. Full of purpose, full of love, full of power, full of Lance's touch, the way nearly every touch had only been a faint and passive ghost of this one.

Lance let his hands fall, and then bent over to bury his face in his hands. "God," he said, mumbled against his palms, and it wasn't the same sort of casual conversational interjection that JC had used it as. "Oh, God, thank you, thank you, God..."

JC put a hand on Lance's shoulder, and the sense redoubled: relief thanksgiving reluctant acceptance stubborn pride overwritten by bone-deep gratitude radiant and glorious love. "What is it? Lance, what was that? What's wrong?"

When Lance let his hands fall, his cheeks were wet, but he was smiling. "I was -- I'd been so worried. That I'd done something wrong, giving you the magic. That I'd hurt you, or condemned you, or tainted you. That I'd created something where you'd be able to use the magic, be able to function as Magus, but never really be accepted." He shook his head. "But that -- there's no doubt. You have it, now. And it's not just the part that came from me."

"Um, yeah," JC said. He didn't quite understand why it was such a big deal. "I told you."

Lance shook his head. "No, you don't understand." He reached for JC's hand, squeezed it tightly. "This means neither one of us has to be alone in what we're doing again. For as long as we can stand to work together. And I have a feeling that we're going to be able to work together from a great deal further than most Magi can."

"Lance." JC tried to be as kind as he could, because he could vaguely sense why it was so significant to Lance. Lance had spent so long learning to be alone that it had taken him a long time to learn that he didn't have to be. "I told you that from the very beginning. It doesn't take some kind of -- I don't know, act of God or something to prove it." He took a deep breath. "You're not going to get rid of me. Not now, not ever. But no more stupid cowboy heroics or General Custer's Last Stand, okay? We're in this together."

"Together," Lance said, and smiled again. It was like a long-held burden had dropped from his shoulders. "I'm going to need some time to get used to that."

*

It took a few hours before they could figure out how to link together without drowning in it, and even longer for them to work out how to direct that linked power, but by the afternoon, they could mesh their magic and wind up with something greater than either of them could manage solo. It wasn't the usual kind of working-together two sorcerers could produce, with two separate-but-linked power signatures; together, they were one, one in a way JC put aside for later study and contemplation. It didn't mean JC wasn't sweating by the end of Wednesday night when he finally managed, with Lance holding him up and keeping his "hand" steady, to re-key the wards so they contained their own linked power signature.

"That's it," he said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. "Okay. I think I've got it."

Lance nodded, and then swept a hand over the ward. It seemed to quiver for a minute, and then slid back to its original form, like water flowing downhill. "Try it again."

"Dammit," JC said, but he knew Lance was right.

By the middle of Thursday JC was getting awfully sick of the word "again", but he could alter things in only a few minutes, instead of the long and torturous hours it had taken the previous day. It took him a few minutes to realize, when he stopped for the last time, that the dreaded "again" hadn't come. He looked up to see Lance looking back at him.

"I think that's about as much as we can do for now without going completely nuts," Lance said. "Come on. Let's get you into the bathtub for a nice long soak before Chris's party thing."

"Oh, God," JC said. "Party."

Lance smiled. "There's always the possibility of tequila."

Chris took five minutes hugging Lance when they both arrived, and then stepped back, looked him head to toe, looked over at JC, and then crowed loudly. "I knew it."

"Knew what?" JC couldn't help but smile. Chris, when he was in the mood for a party, was infectious. Like Ebola.

"Nothing," Chris said, a bit too smugly for JC's taste, and then waved a hand toward the bar. "Go, drink, be merry. If you try to leave without coming over for the birthday kisses, I will be most irate."

Lance laughed, a low rumble. "Only after the reporters leave. You know how it works. Can I hold out for the birthday spankings, instead?"

They stuck around until the last party-goers were leaving the club, and Chris found them half-sprawled across one of the tables, both still stone cold sober and idly debating whether a cover of a song could ever possibly be better than the original. Chris slid into the booth with them, suddenly all business, and said, "So, Joey tells me the shit's about to hit the fan."

By mutual consent, they'd left the topic alone for the night. Lance winced, but answered. "Yeah, probably tomorrow. We're heading up that way when we wake up in the morning."

Chris tipped his head to one side and studied them both. "I know I've been pretty bad with ignoring all this stuff, but you both do know that if you need me for anything, just -- just call, right?"

JC knew how much that must have cost Chris to say. He slid his hand across the table and folded it over Chris's, answering for them both. "We know. It's gonna be okay, man. We've got it mostly under control."

"It's the mostly part that scares me," Chris said, but it was nearly entirely a joke. Nearly.

JC woke up late again, just past noon, and when he got out of the shower Lance handed him the entertainment section of the paper without saying another word. "Thanks," JC grunted, and then settled in.

Ten minutes later, something exploded behind his eyes.

"Fuck," Lance said from across the table. JC's phone rang, just as he was beginning to be able to breathe again, and he whimpered and knew he had to answer. Kelly was talking before he even picked it up.

"JC, you have to help me, something's happened --" Her voice was quick and tight, the words falling over each other as though she were holding off panic with ragged fingernails.

JC knew the feeling. "What? Kelly, what -- what's wrong?"

He could hear her hysteria building behind every word. "We were sitting in the living room and Joey was finishing up his reading and getting ready to leave for the theatre and -- the door opened, it just opened, even though we had it locked, and this man walked in and pointed at Joey and just said 'follow me' and Joey did, he looked like he was fighting it for a minute and then he put down the book and -- it was like he was dragging himself across the room, and then the man pointed at me and said 'sleep' and -- it was like I wanted to lie down and just forget, and I think I might have for a minute, and when I opened my eyes the baby was screaming and Joey was gone, he was gone, and I don't know where he went or who that man was or what's going on here and you have to do something, I know he's been doing something for you and I don't want to know what it is but he took Joey and you have to find him!" She gulped for breath.

JC took the chance to interrupt. It felt like a supernova was fueling itself with the neurons just behind his eyeballs. "Kel. Breathe. I need you to calm down for a minute, just tell me -- did Joey say anything? Do anything?" He tried to signal to Lance with his eyes. Lance was already moving, running for their shoes and their bags.

Kelly took a deep, shuddering breath, one that sounded more like a hiccup than anything else. "No. He -- he put the book down. Turned a few pages. And then just got up and went, it was like he was being dragged --"

Fuck, fuck, fuck. JC seized on the one detail. "The book. Tell me what it says."

"You want me to read a fucking book when some fucking freak has Joey?"

JC winced. "Please, Kel, it might be important --" He shoved his feet into the shoes Lance brought him and stood up, then nearly had to sit back down at the low slow roll of "danger" in his stomach.

Kelly seemed to be getting over the panic, and edging quickly into the pissed. "Fuck you, JC, Joey's gone and you want to know what he was reading?" He could hear her footsteps, though, as she crossed the room. "Something with weird symbols on one side and English on the other. Halfway down it's got, like, a heading or something."

JC had that buzzing in the back of his head, like he was on the right track, like something was happening. "What does it say?"

"Jesus." She paused. "'The ritual for returning of the dead.' Is that what you wanted to know?"

JC swallowed. "Yeah," he managed, and looked up at Lance, who was standing next to him and looking like he might jump out of his skin any minute. "Yeah, it is. We'll be there as soon as humanly possible, Kel. We'll be there. Just -- sit tight. Call the police. See what they have to say. We'll be there as soon as we can."

"You'd better be," Kelly said, and hung up the phone.

JC looked up at Lance. "Joey --"

"I heard," Lance said. "I know. Come on."

JC stood up. "I'll call the airline from the car --"

"No time for that," Lance said. "We're going to have to go the other way."

*

"The other way", apparently, involved a seedy-looking warehouse in a neighborhood JC had been fairly certain that he'd never have to venture into ever again. He'd been happy about that fact, too. He shifted from foot to foot and tried to avoid looking like a good candidate for a mugging while Lance banged twice on the door, then pulled back his foot and kicked it. JC winced at the sound.

A few seconds later, a panel in the door rasped open, scraping over rust and metal, and a pair of yellow eyes peered out from the darkness. "Closed," the voice said. JC frowned. It sounded like two voices in one, layered over each other, curiously overdubbed and a half-step out of tune.

"Not to me," Lance said firmly. "To us. Open the door."

"Closed," the voice repeated. "Even to you."

"You will open this door," Lance said, "or I will reach my hand through that window, wrap it around your neck, and squeeze."

JC thought the scariest thing about Lance when he got into a mood like this was the way he could make such a threat sound perfectly pleasant, like he was merely making a comment about the weather. There was a pause, and then the door rasped open.

The yellow eyes and the dual-toned voice belonged to someone -- something -- standing about chest-high on JC, with sickly greyish skin and stringy yellow hair. He didn't know what the thing was, and he didn't particularly want to know. It stared balefully up at them both, then turned its head and spat on the ground. "Magus this, Magus that. Magus thinks he can just walk in and take. Getting in the door doesn't do anything to get you where you're going."

"Manhattan," Lance said. "If you can get us there before five minutes have passed, I will come back to you and bring you as much silver as I can find."

It hissed through jagged teeth. "Silver now."

Lance shook his head. "Silver when I return. Manhattan. Will you send us?"

It seemed to consider it for a moment, and then spat again and turned away. JC didn't know quite what to do, but Lance followed it down the dark corridor that led deeper into the warehouse, so JC went along behind.

It stopped just in front of a doorway. "Your word, Magus."

Lance sighed. JC thought if they hadn't been under so much time pressure (ticking underneath his skin, like an invisible countdown, like a clock racing toward a deadline he did not know), he might have argued. "I swear on my oath. If you send us safely to Manhattan, without any delays or side trips, I shall return to you with as much silver as I can find in the time between now and my return."

JC idly thought someday Lance would need to teach him the trick of phrasing promises in such a way as to eliminate all the possible loopholes. The thing rocked back and forth on the balls of its misshapen feet, considering again, and then nodded. "Yes," it said, and tapped the door, which shimmered, then seemed to fold in on itself, leaving behind nothing but a swirling vortex.

"Come on," Lance said, and strode through. He disappeared halfway.

JC closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and followed. The pit of his stomach seemed to drop and then re-settle somewhere else, like taking off in an airplane only ten times worse, and when he opened his eyes they were in a back corridor in a deserted section of what looked like the Port Authority. Of course they were in Port Authority. Where else would a magical portal to Manhattan wind up?

"Come on," Lance repeated, and strode off down the hallway. JC had to trot slightly to catch up.

"What -- how was -- how did we --"

"I'll explain later," Lance said. "We have to get down to Joey's place and see if we can catch the trail before it gets cold. If Joey's gone --"

JC managed to get a grip on Lance's arm and pull. Lance stumbled to a halt, turning around and looking back as though to object. JC shook his head. "We don't need to go to the townhouse."

"We need to find the trail --"

Listening to that slowly-growing conviction in the back of his mind, JC shook his head again. "No, we don't. I know where he took Joey." He took a quick look around himself, trying to figure out where the nearest exit was, trying to ignore the hundreds of people who pushed past them without noticing them at all. He could feel it pulsing, deep within him. "I know where he took Joey, and I think I know what he's trying to do."

Lance blinked. JC went for the door. For once, when they got outside and caught the first taxi they could find, he didn't get lost in Manhattan at all.

*

The ward JC had left in the elevator tripped with screaming emphasis when Lance stepped on it, and JC lifted a hand and blew it away before it could start nagging him. He didn't know why it hadn't tripped when Joey and their adversary had gone over it, because he knew they were there, knew it like he knew his own name. He could taste Joey's terror in the back of his throat, so nearby, so close.

"Stairs," Lance said, looking at JC. JC wondered how Lance had known what he was thinking, and then realized the connection had been building for the last half-hour, pulling them closer together, each of them overlapping the other like a carbon-paper tracing. It wasn't as though they were falling into each other, not this time. More like they were augmenting each other. JC knew what Lance was thinking, too, and what Lance was thinking was hurry. Stairs. Of course. He would have seen the warning and avoided it. JC would have kicked himself for being stupid, except he didn't have the time. They were out of the elevator and through the door of the apartment almost before the doors finished closing behind them, and then JC stopped, because he'd forgotten about the fucking wards.

"No time to do this the elegant way," he said, holding out his hands, and Lance nodded. Lance slipped his left hand into JC's right, and together they reached --

All that time wasted to learn how to deal with those without being noticed and we're just going to blow through them anyway, JC thought, and then, it's amazing what you think of when you're this close to overdosing on adrenaline, and then the wards were gone and JC was moving again.

Through the other doorway. Pause, stop, turn his head, take in the scene; bedroom this way, kitchen that way, and this was the door that felt like there were people behind it. He was all too aware of Lance at his elbow, making his own assessments, cataloguing the rooms as quickly as his eyes could take them in.

Lance caught his hand just as he was about to push open the door. "Wait." There was urgency there, but it was overlaid with caution. "You know the rules. Never open the door before you know what's on the other side of it."

"Fuck," JC said, mostly because he knew Lance was right. Never stop to do something without thinking about it first, even when it was personal. Especially when it was personal. A fraction of a second to check the door, make sure it wasn't protected, and oh God he'd lost the sense of Joey when they'd paused to break the wards and he couldn't find it again: only one heartbeat behind the door, and the low slow roil of magic that made JC's stomach turn.

"On three," Lance said.

"Fuck you," JC said, and blew open the door.

JC lost his keys at the drop of a hat and could never remember where he'd left his cell phone and sometimes he forgot what day it was, much less the date, but this job was about being able to take in a whole lot of detail as quickly as possible. The room had a high ceiling and no windows and was lit only by candles, flickering and casting shadows that seemed, uncomfortably, to move under their own power. There were three people in the room. Only one of them was standing, and it wasn't Joey.

The room smelled the way Catholic churches used to. The walls were bare and water-stained. JC could see the man who was turning around from the altar, or the worktable, or whatever you wanted to call it, and he ran through the details as quickly as he could: white hair, stooped shoulders, everybody's grandfather or great-uncle, dressed in a long white robe and wearing no shoes or jewelry, looking disoriented from the rebound of his wards being broken but dangerous underneath it anyway. JC didn't have the time to really stop and do anything else, though, because there were two twin beds pushed over to the walls of the room, and on one of them was a tiny, elderly woman, and on the other was Joey. Even from where JC was standing, frozen in that one second before everything went to hell, he could see that neither body was breathing.

Division of labor; they'd never talked about it, but in that strange clarity of union they didn't have to. He could hear Lance behind him, muttering something under his breath, quick and short and choppy, but JC was already halfway across the room on unsteady feet. Joey was shirtless and his eyes were closed and he looked like he was sleeping, just sleeping, but people who were sleeping didn't also look like black holes to those other senses. JC couldn't see anything in Joey, none of the spark that was supposed to be there, and he pressed both his hands to Joey's chest and threw a double-handful of power into him. Joey was still and his skin was cooling and his chest wasn't moving, Joey was

gone

--stripped of everything he was supposed to have, all the power fueling the bright hot sense of Joey behind JC's eyes was gone, and the power JC poured into Joey's skin trickled, pooled, and ran steadily downhill, like water through a cup that had cracked and broken. It wasn't holding, it wasn't staying, JC couldn't fix it, Joey was

dead

--bare and still and cold and JC refused to panic, refused to. He closed his eyes and called to his power again, too distracted to frame the prayer in any language other than English, too distracted to frame the prayer as anything other than a wordless silent please God, feeling it flare behind his eyes, feeling it bleed through his fingers and into Joey's body, willing it to flare back into life inside Joey's chest. He leaned over and pinched Joey's nose, tilted back his head, breathed into Joey's mouth, knowing he was doing it wrong but wrong was still something and how the hell were you supposed to remember how to perform mouth to mouth when you were in the middle of trying to pull back one of the four people you'd die without, anyway? Joey's chest rose and fell with the exhalation, and JC reached (Lance behind him, voices rising and falling, argument and the first warning shots of a magical fight that JC could not pay attention to but felt anyway, felt each crackle of magic against his own skin), wrapped the fingers of his magic around Joey's heart and squeezed, willing it to beat on its own. It did, twice, and then fell still again.

There were a few cuts along Joey's arms, thin and long and oh God they weren't bleeding anymore even though they should have been, but Joey's skin wasn't marked the way the others' had been. Their adversary hadn't had to pull the magic loose from Joey with the pain and the suffering he'd had to use for the others, because the magic hadn't been Joey's to begin with, it had been JC's, and JC had put it there, and the man who was doing all of this had been too stupid or too blind or just too fucking crazy to tell the fucking difference between temporary power storage and natural gift; when he'd needed someone with the holy magic he'd taken Joey and oh, God, Joey was dead and it was JC's fucking fault.

The last bits of it were falling into place.

JC pulled his head back and took a breath for himself, because he was starting to see spots behind his eyes and they weren't just from the magic that was flying around the room. Lance was shouting something, and there was a battle to the death going on five feet away from him and he couldn't take the time to stop and see what was going on, because he didn't have a second to spare. Six minutes before brain death, and he'd already used three of them. The numbers ticked off in the one corner of his brain that wasn't gibbering at him.

Joey was still there, somewhere, because he had to be; JC wasn't going to let him go, wasn't going to give up. JC took another breath and forced it into Joey's lungs, used his magic to force Joey's heart to beat and threw another rush of power into Joey, willing it to catch, willing it to hold and kick-start Joey's body back to doing what it should, and none of it was staying, because it had all been taken away.

Lance was shouting something and JC wasn't listening, too busy trying to divide his attention between breathing for Joey and willing his heart to beat again, until he felt a bolt of power, clumsy with the need for haste, slam into his shields. He jerked his head up, sharp with the distraction and the dizziness of breathing all his oxygen into someone else's lungs, and Lance (circling the altar with the man on the other side of it, neither of them taking their eyes off the other, crackling with power and just waiting for an opening) shouted, "The focus, it's on her chest, give it back to him, idiot!" It distracted Lance long enough for the other man to get a shot of magic off, and Lance took it straight to the chest and jerked backwards, going down on one knee and trying to shake it off.

JC whipped his head around to the other bed, where the woman was lying. A flat disc, made of obsidian with symbols carved on its surface, about the size of an LP, was lying on her chest. It sparked when he reached to pick it up, like it had been plugged into an electrical socket. The man shouted something incomprehensible and lunged after JC, but Lance snaked out a hand and caught his ankle just in time, and they went down, grappling. JC's skin crawled where he touched the disc, but he dropped it down on Joey's chest and laid his hand out flat over it.

It felt like fifteen people all wrapped up in one, and JC fumbled through the threads of sense to try and tease out the one he needed. He knew Joey was in there, he could feel it, but there was no time to pick through the threads that had been so intermingled and pull out just that one. Key, key, he had to find the key, had to find what would trigger it and make everything that had been stored rush out and run into Joey instead of into the woman it had been intended for. He threw a tendril of power at it and it sparked again, leaving the sickening hiss of scorching flesh behind. JC drew back his hand, nearly cried with the frustration of it all, and fumbled in his pocket to find the knife that please God he'd remembered to shove in his jeans before leaving.

Joey, he thought, and held the memory of a hundred mornings with bagels and coffee and a hundred nights of falling asleep on Joey's shoulder firmly in his mind to distract himself from what he was about to do, then closed his hand around the blade of the knife and pulled.

It hurt, the way the magic had first hurt, the way it hurt when you sliced into your skin and didn't care how deep you cut. He let the knife fall and opened his hand. It's all in the blood and his blood was slippery over his skin. He could feel the seconds tick-tick-ticking. For a minute, just a minute, JC wondered if he had the right to do this, the right to make this decision even if it was to save Joey's life, if he could still hold his head up and say he'd never once stepped over the line. Then he remembered Joey's words to him, as though through a whole hissing fuckload of static (my permanent consent to do anything you think is necessary), and before he could change his mind he slammed his hand down onto Joey's chest and called.

The magic ran through his hand like water, through him and into the obsidian, through the obsidian and into Joey. The disc quivered against Joey's chest, against JC's blood-slick hand. JC held his hand there, as tightly as he could, willing it into Joey, willing Joey to wake up damn it Joey wake up wake up you stubborn fuckhead open your eyes and start breathing again right this minute. The man Lance was fighting shrieked, a long low howl of sorrow and heartbreak. JC couldn't take his eyes away from Joey, from the way the disc seemed to melt and shift and sink into Joey's chest, until all JC was touching was cool skin and his own blood underneath his hand.

And then Joey's eyes snapped open, and he sat bolt upright on the bed and screamed. It was an awful sound, one that cut right through JC's ears and sliced at the raw ends of his nerves. "Joey," he said, and grabbed at Joey's shoulders, holding on as tightly as he could, remembering, remembering how much it had hurt. He was still distracted, still not thinking quickly enough, but he kept enough presence of mind to weave a boundary of magic, to try and block out everything else in the room, holding it around Joey and trying to deaden the impact of what he could only imagine was happening. Joey's arm flew up and knocked JC's grip off his shoulders; he scrabbled back on the bed, trying to get away, coughing and choking and throwing his arms over his face to try and block it all out. He was whimpering, a low sick noise like a hurt animal, and JC couldn't tell but he might have been whimpering along.

"Joey," JC repeated. "Joey, Joey, Joey." Call his name, make him remember. He could only imagine what Joey was feeling, the sudden shock of having traces and bits of fourteen other people inside his skull with him, the shock of (having been dead) waking up and suddenly finding his world shaken up and stood on end. "Joey, breathe with it, come on, remember, fight it, don't go --"

He felt the air shifting behind him half a second before something slammed up against his skull, heavy and sharp, and the last thing he heard was Joey still keening softly.

*

The voices rolled through JC's ears like waves, and he could taste blood in his mouth. The first thing he was aware of was the bright hot pain behind his eyelids, and it took him a minute to breathe through it and remember.

"--be coming around in a minute," he heard Lance say from somewhere right next to him, sounding tired but calm, and then there was a cool soothing damp weight on his forehead, like some kind of cloth. JC tried to say something, and it only came out as noise.

"C." Joey's voice, scratchy and weak, but JC nearly cried to be able to hear it. "Come on, man, if I'm awake and moving -- shut up, I'm talking -- you have to be too."

JC wondered who Joey had meant, when he interrupted himself, because nobody else was trying to talk. He opened his eyes slowly, and then winced, because it only made the headache worse. He was lying on the couch, he realized, and Lance was kneeling on the floor next to him.

"Did we win?" It was a stupid question, and JC knew it was a stupid question, but it distracted him while he opened his eyes again and tried to fight back the nausea. Lance was looking at him with concern, and JC could see the beginnings of a black eye. That strange sense of overlap had faded while JC was unconscious, but it was still there; he had the sensation that if he only closed his eyes and concentrated he'd be able to see himself through Lance's eyes.

"We won," Lance said. "I took care of him. You took care of Joey. It's all over now. I just need you to wake up enough to help me figure out the last little bits of it, and clean up what's left."

"Like how to get this out of me," Joey said. His voice sounded odd, like there was an echo in the room.

"Get --" JC frowned, and then struggled to sit up. He squinted against the light (living room light, which meant someone, probably Lance, had hauled him out of the workroom while he'd been unconscious) and then squinted some more, because you could see it, when you looked with the right eyes. "Oh, God. Oh, Jesus, Joey, I didn't --"

Joey was still shirtless, and there was a bright smear of drying blood across his chest and what looked like a burn mark underneath. His eyes were closed and he was holding himself still, very still, as though he was trying to avoid moving or jostling his skin. "Didn't what?" he said, and then brought one hand up to press at the side of his face, rubbing at his temple. "Didn't stop to ask if I wanted it?"

"Joey, I'm so fucking sorry," JC said, and leaned forward, ignoring the way his head felt like it was going to fall off his shoulders. He squinted against the light some more and studied Joey, really looked at him, and saw it. Fragments, pieces and parts, all melted together in the crucible of that external focus, given back to Joey instead of where the other mage -- they still didn't know his name, JC realized, and it was just one little stupid realization on top of a ton of other realizations that weren't anywhere near as stupid -- had wanted it to go. Given back to Joey because Joey was part of the mixture, and Joey was the only one who was still close enough to save, but JC hadn't stopped to think about what else would come with it.

"You put it there," Joey said. JC thought he might hear a touch of hysteria building, and Lance reached behind himself and put a hand on Joey's knee. Joey shook it off, quickly, as though he didn't want to be touched. JC couldn't really blame him. "You put it there. I don't want it. Take it back."

"Joey, I can't --" Joey shook his head as JC was talking, like he didn't want to hear what JC was saying. "I really can't, Joey. You were dead. It was the only way I could bring you back."

"I told you I don't want this. I don't. Jesus, I've seen what it's done to you, what it's done to Lance, what you guys have had to do -- I don't want it, I don't want any of it, and you didn't even ask first --"

"Joey, you were dead --"

"Yeah, well." Joey dropped his hand and opened his eyes to look at JC, and then had to drop his eyes nearly immediately. JC wondered what Joey saw. What Joey could see. "From this end of things, it doesn't necessarily look a whole hell of a lot better."

"Enough," Lance said, a bit sharply.

"Joey," JC said. He could tell he had a concussion, though probably only a mild one, and his hand hurt like fuck where he'd sliced it open, but he could damn well ignore it for long enough. "You said -- I know I didn't ask first. But you said. Twice, you said. You told me I had your permission to do anything I thought I needed to do."

"I didn't mean this."

"It was the only way --"

"Enough," Lance repeated. He rocked back on his heels and stood up. "Joey, you said it. You should never say anything like that. And now you know why. I would have done the same thing, and I wouldn't have worried if you'd given your consent or not, and I wouldn't bother feeling as guilty as JC does about it. Jayce, I need you awake and thinking. We're not done with this yet."

"Fucking cold bastard," Joey said, and dropped his head back against the chair. JC thought he saw Lance's shoulders jerk for a minute. It might have been his imagination.

"Joey," JC said, because he couldn't let it go yet. "We'll figure it out. We'll figure out something." And then, because Lance was right and there was work still to be done, he let it go until he had time to deal with it. He looked back at Lance. "I was right, wasn't I. He was trying to bring her back to life."

Lance nodded. "And nearly succeeded. If we'd been ten minutes later --" He trailed off and bit his lip.

"By assembling a package of all her talents and all her magical skills, and giving it a soul to animate it all. And it was us. Our fault, I mean. That he figured out how to do it. That he figured out it was even possible. He knew someone who knew someone who knew us, or he saw me somewhere and could figure out enough of what we'd done, or he, I don't know, tapped into some sort of magical collective unconscious and knew someone had figured out how to transfer the holy magic through blood magic, not just sorcery. It was us."

Lance closed his eyes for a second, and then opened them again. "I don't know if it was us or not. But yes. He loved her, and she was his partner, and she died, and he couldn't face the thought of life without her. So he was going to try to bring her back. He managed to preserve the body, but her soul was already gone, and he was half crazy with grief and he didn't realize that even if he did manage to re-animate her, it wouldn't be her. And fourteen people died for it. Nearly fifteen."

"Did you --" kill him? JC stopped himself before he could finish the sentence. "Is he dead?" He couldn't bring himself to resent the fact that he'd been the one to pursue the guy and Lance had been the one to finally stop him. And anyway, in the end, they were so close it was almost like working as one anyway.

Lance shook his head. "No, he's not. He's not going to be a problem to anyone but himself from now on, though. I made sure of that."

JC reached for the wet cloth that Lance had dropped on his forehead, which had fallen down when he sat up, and shook it out to make it cool again, then pressed it gently against the palm of his hand, which still hurt like a son of a bitch. At least the bleeding had stopped, cauterized by the magic. Better than stitches. Or something like that. "Before or after he hit me in the back of the head?" he asked, and then waved one hand. "No, no, sorry, ignore that. What'd you do?"

"I really don't want to talk about it," Lance said. His eyes flicked over to Joey, still sitting in the chair.

"Yeah, well, I really don't particularly want to do a lot of things, and I do them anyway. Partners, Lance. That means information goes both ways. What did you do to him?"

Lance sighed and started pacing, several steps each way, short and brisk. "Made it so that if he so much as thinks about magic, much less tries to work it, he won't be able to stay conscious long enough to do anything about it. I had to go pretty deep into his head to do it, and it's pretty fucking crazy in there, and it was really unpleasant. He's out cold now, and he'll stay that way for a while. Are you all right? I tried to stop him from hitting you, but he'd just gotten me, and I was disoriented."

"I'm fine," JC said, and made himself stand up. The room only spun a little bit. "What are you -- are we -- what do we still need to do? To pick up."

Lance shook his head and came to a halt, then lifted his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. "We need to call someone, the cops or the Feds or something, to come and pick him up, because I'm not going to leave him alone and give him the chance to somehow get away. Even if he can't do magic, he still has the knowledge, and I can't take that away from him. I'd sleep a lot easier if I knew he was going right into the custody of someone who's got a vested interest in keeping him behind bars."

"Okay," JC said. "Call Nguyen. He said if we ran into anything, to call him, and he'd find us someone who knew what was going on, someone we could call and not have to explain things to." Something else occurred to him. "And, oh, Jesus. Somebody call Kelly and tell her Joey's okay."

"Already did," Joey said, without opening his eyes or lifting his head from the back of the chair. "She called you a cocksucking motherfucker and said she was going to eat your liver the next time she sees you."

JC winced. "Did she mean it?"

Joey's teeth flashed quickly. It wasn't quite a smile. "Every word."

Lance turned around on his heel, more quickly than JC could follow with the way things were still swimming. "In the name of the Name, Joseph, will you just shut up and drop it? Yes, all right, you're upset, we get the picture, we'll do everything we can to fix this once we're done with the rest of what we have to do, but sitting there and heaping abuse on JC isn't going to do a damn thing. If you're going to snarl at someone, snarl at me. I already told you I would have done the same thing, and I wouldn't have even stopped to think twice ahead of time. And it wouldn't have mattered if you'd given your consent."

"Yeah, well," Joey said. "You didn't."

"I told him what to do. Is that enough for you to hate him instead of me? For God's sake, Joey, we don't have time for this kind of playground crap. Shit happened, you got fucked over, deal with it. There are people who would kill to be in your shoes."

"There are people who did kill to be in my shoes," Joey snapped back. "And you're not the one who's having trouble figuring out if what he's thinking is what he's actually thinking and not some crazy echo of some other person who's dead, all right, so I think I can be forgiven for having a little bit of a fucking freakout here."

"Enough!" JC shouted, and then closed his eyes and whimpered, because it hurt. "Please. Please, let's all just stop arguing. Joey, I'm sorry. I am. You have no idea how sorry I am, and if there's anything, anything at all I can do to fix it for you, I will, but we don't have the time right now and I'm in too much pain to even start trying. Lance, call Nguyen. I want to get the last of this settled and go and sleep for a few hundred years or so."

Through the connection, JC knew Lance wanted to keep the argument going, wanted to defend JC to Joey, but Lance nodded slowly instead. "All right. Are you okay enough to go and do a forensic sweep of the workroom? To make sure they're not going to turn around and point the fingers at us. I hate to make you do something like that when you've got a concussion, but I'm run down pretty far and I don't think I can pull it off, plus I'm not very good at it in the first place."

"Yeah," JC said, after polling himself to see how badly he was hurting. Not as badly as Lance; the battle Lance had fought had been, JC thought, closer than Lance would ever admit. "I think I can."

"C'mere," Lance said, and brushed his fingertips across JC's forehead. A brief spark of healing magic -- and oh, Lance really wasn't lying about being exhausted, because it was a bare whisper of song instead of his usual symphony -- and JC's headache receded, slightly. "Better?"

"Yeah," JC said. "A little. I'll be back."

It didn't take him long to clean up -- some of Joey's blood, some of his own blood, a few of Lance's hairs, fibers from all their clothes. JC had to work more slowly than he was used to, because he kept losing his concentration and the sorcery was coming less quickly to his hand than the holy magic would have, but he got it done. By the time he got back into the other room, Lance had apparently finished on the phone; he was kneeling in front of Joey's easy chair -- one hand on each arm of the chair, leaning close -- and speaking to Joey in a low and steady voice, holding Joey's eyes with his own. JC tried to stay as quiet as he could, because he knew Lance was trying to help Joey shut down as much of the new sense as possible. Lance had done the same for him.

It seemed to help, at least somewhat, because Joey looked a little less pale and a little less distracted. Lance brushed his fingers over Joey's forehead and then rocked back to stand up. He seemed to sway, as though he was having trouble keeping upright. JC resisted the urge to put a hand in the small of Lance's back and help him keep standing. "Is everything all right?" JC asked, quietly. He was almost starting to feel better, and he tentatively extended a mental "hand" with a tendril of power to Lance. Their power mingled for a minute, mixed and flowed, and then re-balanced easily in equilibrium. Two people working together weren't supposed to share power that easily, across an entire room, but JC was quickly realizing "should"s and "supposed"s didn't mean much.

"Yeah," Lance said. "Nguyen says one of their guys in the Manhattan office, a very minor practitioner, is on her way with a team. Nguyen's given her as much information as he had. They'll be able to take care of things, and then we can finally get some rest. We shouldn't be in the apartment when they get here -- why don't you take Joey down, sit down on the street or something, and I'll be down as soon as I sense they're getting close. I don't want to leave this place alone any longer than I have to."

"Joey can take himself down," Joey said, but it sounded less angry than it would have, a few minutes ago. He pushed himself up to his feet and made his way out the door.

JC traded helpless glances with Lance. "He'll feel better in the morning," JC said, because he had to believe it, and followed.

JC had just enough presence of mind to work the tiny bit of magic that would make people's eyes slide off them unless they were looking; Joey had found a shirt somewhere, so he wasn't that out of place, but still, the last thing they needed was to be recognized. Joey was leaning against the building, and his shoulders jerked slightly when JC let the magic loose, but he didn't say anything for a long minute.

"Times like this," JC finally said into the silence, "I almost wish I smoked. You know. To have something to do with my hands."

Joey snorted. "I've thought that, like, a hundred times." He rolled his shoulders, as though trying to work out the stiffness, and then fell silent again.

JC thought, what the hell, at least he answered me. "How are you feeling? With the, you know, stuff and all."

Joey sighed. "She's quiet now, at least. I think she's realized what's going on, a little, and she realizes I'm not the one who did this to her, I'm just sort of along for the ride."

JC's eyebrows drew together. "She?"

"Yeah, 'she'. Remember that missing soul you ran into?" Joey's lips twisted in a mockery of a smile, and he tapped one of his temples. "Her name's Kate. She's glad you stopped this guy, but she wishes you'd been able to let her go first."

"Oh." JC stopped, and it hit him fully, the whole set of implications. "Oh. Oh God, Joey, I didn't realize, I didn't think --"

Joey sighed. "Yeah, I know. You can stop apologizing, really. I'm pissed, but I'm not really pissed at you. Well, I am, but not -- nevermind. I don't even fucking know what I'm trying to say. Just -- if you can figure out anything to get this out of me. As soon as possible. I'd, you know, really appreciate it."

"I will. God, I didn't realize she was still trapped, I didn't realize she'd be bound up in it --"

"Can't you just do -- I don't know, do what he was doing? Take everything else out of me using that? Take what you could use, set Kate loose, leave me with just whatever I had before?"

JC shook his head and looked out over the street. It was just past sunset, and the light was pale and purple. "Not unless you want to go back to being dead," he said. "First of all, that kind of magic -- that is over the line. Even if you said yes to it, the only way it could work, without you being in control of the magic and knowing how to use it and being able to direct it like Lance was able to do with me, would be to use pain. That's the only way you can shake something like that loose. Lance gave it up to me freely, and he could do it because he had the magic. You don't have the magic, and you can't sense it. You couldn't direct it from inside; whoever was doing it would have to use the dark side of blood magic to get it out of you. And that is over the line, and I -- I couldn't do it. Not to you, not to anyone." He couldn't meet Joey's eyes. "But that's really academic, because even if I could, when he took your life-magic from you, he put it in with everything he took from everyone else, and it all melted and fused together. There's no way that I or anyone else could untangle it and just leave you with what you're supposed to have."

"I'm not supposed to have anything," Joey said, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "I don't have anything."

JC sighed. "You know better than that, Joey," he said, as calmly as he could. "You know how it works. No, you can't -- couldn't -- sense the magic, and no, you couldn't work the magic, not anything other than the little tiny spells that don't cost much and don't require being able to sense what you were doing, and you couldn't actually use any of it. You weren't a sorcerer, you weren't a holy mage, you weren't anything but a guy who read a whole lot of books. But everybody needs to have some magical power, even if they don't have the talent to address that power, and what he took from you was -- was your ability to hold the power. And that's what -- what killed you."

"He wanted to take you, you know. He was looking for you." Joey's voice was flat, and he didn't turn his head to look at JC.

JC let out a hiss of breath. "I know he was. And believe me, if I could have made it be me instead, I would have. I would now, if I could. But I can't. I can't take the rest of the bits of magic away from you without taking your life-magic back from you, too, because it's all gotten melted together and I can't untangle it. Yet. I'm going to keep looking. I want you to believe that. I'm going to keep looking, and if I can't find any answers I'm fucking well going to create them. I swear to you. So help me God."

"I'm not going to use it," Joey said. "Never. I'm not going to even so much as touch it. So much as look at it."

"You don't have to," JC said. "You don't ever have to. Just -- I'll help you try and figure out what all is in there, okay? Just so we know. And then you can ignore it as much as you want to, as much as you need to, and you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. It's not like me and Lance. It's not like you're going to get these sudden calls to go and fix things. You didn't get any of the holy magic, just the rest of it. The sorcery. And you can safely ignore that, and never have to do anything you don't want to do."

Joey nodded. "I know. I just --" He sighed. "I feel like I want to -- I don't know, shake you by the shoulders and shout that this isn't fair, or something."

"No, it's not fair." JC stuck his own hands into his pockets and leaned against the building, his shoulders inches away from Joey's. "But sometimes what I do has nothing to do with fair and everything to do with right. And Joey, I couldn't --"

Joey waited for JC to finish the sentence, and when he didn't, raised an eyebrow. "Couldn't?"

JC was trying to talk past the sudden lump in his throat. He swallowed twice. "Couldn't imagine the thought of you being dead. I -- I almost understand what the guy was doing. Why he was doing it. Because if you guys, if any of you guys ever died, and I thought there was the smallest way, the smallest chance, that I could get you back --"

"Just don't finish that sentence," Joey said, and hunched his shoulders over a little more.

JC could feel Lance coming out of the building, the sense of Lance he carried around with him, just as a black car pulled up to the curb and discharged two men and one woman in nondescript clothing. The doorman started forward to object to them parking in the loading zone, but one of them flashed a badge. The two men went inside; the woman came up to where JC and Joey were standing just as Lance reached them. She was the one who had the sense of magic around her.

"Magus?" she said, looking back and forth between JC and Lance.

"I'm the one who called," Lance said.

She transferred her attention to him. "All right. Nguyen told me what we're going to find up there. All I need to ask you is whether or not I'm going to find anything that's going to require me to do any fast talking to the people who don't know what's really going on."

JC heard what she was really asking: am I going to need to cover your asses? "I cleaned up," he said. "You won't find anything up there that's not supposed to be there. I'm pretty sure you guys are going to be able to pin the other deaths on him, too."

She nodded. "All right. I'll do what I can, and --"

That was when she noticed Joey. Or, to be precise, that was when she seemed to look at Joey. She stood up a little straighter and took a step backwards, then looked back and forth between JC and Lance again. "You didn't."

"There was no other way," JC started, but Lance laid a hand on his arm to quiet him.

"Is there anything else you need from us?" he asked.

The agent took another step backwards. "No," she said. "No, I -- I'm not going to ask, because I don't want to know. Your God will deal with you as He sees fit. I just --" She shook her head and hissed, under her breath. "I'm going to go upstairs and deal with what I need to deal with. Go home. All of you. I don't want to see you here again."

"As you wish," Lance said. His fingers tightened on JC's arm. "Come on, guys. Let's get Joey home before Kelly gets any more worried."

They were quiet in the cab for a few minutes, and then Joey asked, "What'd she mean? The 'may your God deal with you' thing?"

Lance was staring fixedly out the window. "Apparently she might be a minor practitioner, but she's got very well-developed sight. She could see what had happened. At least enough to recognize the blood magic."

"And?" Joey asked.

Lance sighed. "And it's one thing for me to have given JC part of my own magic. The community looks at that sideways, but doesn't actively disapprove of -- oh, they disapprove, but it's considered to be vaguely within my own discretion. Frowned upon, but not utterly and completely taboo. But with you --"

"She looked at Joey and thought you'd let one of your friends benefit from blood and pain magic. From the deaths of people." It wasn't a question; JC knew, the minute Lance had started talking.

Lance breathed out heavily. "Yeah. Or, worst-case scenario, thought I was the one who was doing it. Or I'd grabbed some kind of opportunity to -- Yeah. She's probably not going to be the only one, either."

"So you're saying everyone who takes a look at me with the right set of eyes is going to think I'm some kind of mass-murdering freak?" Joey said. His voice was too calm, really. Joey only sounded like that right before he was really going to explode.

"No," Lance said. "We'll shield you. Or teach you how to shield it. Teach you how to keep invisible, at least, so nobody will know it's there unless they're really looking for it. And not everyone can see that sort of thing; it depends on their own individual talents, and how well they've developed their sight." He paused, then sighed. "But it's going to go around fast. I know it will. And the community is going to --"

"Think you've gone over the line," JC said. "Think you've gone rogue."

Lance buried his face in his hands. "We'll deal with it later," he said, muffled against his skin. "Once we've cleaned this up. Once we've gotten everything picked up. I'm not going to worry about it yet. I've never worried much about what everyone thinks of me anyway; I'm not going to start now."

"They hunt rogue mages," JC said. He knew that much.

"I said, I'm not going to worry about it now," Lance said, and that was it until they pulled up in front of Joey's brownstone.

*

Kelly yanked the door open before Joey could do any more than fumble for his keys, and hit him hard mid-chest with a hug so fierce JC thought he heard vertebrae pop in Joey's back. He and Lance hung back while Joey just held on.

Kelly was the one to speak first. "Don't you ever, ever, in your entire life, frighten me that badly ever again, Joseph Anthony Fatone," she said, and shook him. JC could see the glimmer of tears in the corners of her eyes. "If you ever scare me like that ever again, I'm gonna -- I'm gonna -- Well, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna do it, and you're not going to like it."

"I'm sorry, Kel," Joey said. "It wasn't my fault."

"Oh, no, I know that," she said, and glared directly at JC. "I know whose fault this was."

"Can we do this somewhere other than on the front porch?" Lance asked quietly, and pushed his way past Kelly and into the house.

Kelly seemed to take the door closing as a sign it was okay to let loose. "You guys all think I'm fucking stupid," she said. It wasn't quite at the level of "yell" yet, but it was creeping closer. "I've been thinking about what's going on, and I've been thinking about what happened, and I'm fucking smart enough to realize it's got something to do with all the reading Joey's been doing lately. And I'm smart enough to know you --" Her finger jabbed JC right in the sternum. "--are the one who got him into this, which means you are the one who got him into danger, and how the hell did you know whoever it was who wanted to, I don't know, eat him wouldn't come after the baby?"

"I wouldn't let anything happen to my goddaughter, Kel," Lance said, and tried to put a hand on her shoulder to calm her down. She shook it off and whirled around to face him.

"And you. You, there's something that's just wrong with you, and I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. The two of you have done something to him, something to get him involved in all of this, and you need to stop it and leave him alone and leave me alone and just back the fuck right off and most of all stop treating me like I'm fucking four years old and can't see what's going on under my nose, all right? Because I don't know what's going on, but I know you've put Joey in danger, you've put me in danger, and you've put our fucking daughter in danger --"

"Kelly," JC said.

She rode roughshod right over the top of his voice. "--and I absolutely will not stand for that, I will not let you bring that sort of danger into my home, not when I --"

"Kelly." This time, he put just a hint of power behind it.

She stopped, blinking slightly, and closed her mouth. JC was tired, and Kelly was angry, and maybe he'd spent too much time tonight being halfway in Lance's head. Maybe the magic was just changing him, the way Joey had feared. Maybe he just wanted to go home and sleep. Before he could stop himself, before he thought about it again, he reached for his magic and cupped her cheek in one hand. "Forget," he said, softly.

Kelly blinked a few times, and then shook her head, as though she was trying to shake off some kind of daze. Next to Lance, Joey's head snapped up, and he almost took a step forward, but Lance shifted subtly, just enough to put his own body between Joey and JC. Kelly blinked again, and then looked at Joey, puzzled.

"You're home early," she said. "What happened, was the show cancelled? And I didn't know you guys were in town."

"I wasn't feeling well," Joey said, after a minute. His voice was tight. "Pulled a muscle in my leg, couldn't dance, so they sent me home and told me to take better care of myself. Can you do me a favor and run a bath for me, babe? I'm just gonna soak it for a while and then go to bed. Don't worry. They're not staying."

JC closed his eyes at the venom in the last few words. I shouldn't have -- Kelly laughed. "I told you that you had to watch it when you were jumping off the table. You know the doctor said you'd probably have problems with that leg for a few years. I'll go and run the bath, and I'll put some of the goop that's good for sore muscles in there. Just make sure you don't wind up standing here for like, twenty minutes and talking, because I know you guys."

"Oh, I'll only be a few minutes," Joey said. When JC opened his eyes again, Kelly was gone, and Joey leaned forward, around Lance, and closed his hand around JC's upper arm, tight enough to bruise.

"You wanna explain what that was?" Joey hissed, in an undertone. "You wanna try and tell me she gave you any kind of consent?"

"Joey," JC started. He didn't even know what he'd say to defend himself -- he'd known even as he was doing it that he shouldn't have, but it was better for Kelly, right? Not to remember the fear and worry, not to remember the anger. (And this way she won't be able to ask any awkward questions, the voice whispered in the back of his head. And that's why you did it, isn't it?)

Joey shook his head. "I don't want to hear it, okay? I just -- don't want to hear it. I spent this long helping you two out, and I spent this long dealing with shit for you, and that's it, I'm done. I was willing to stand by you, but when you do shit like that you've forgotten what it's like to stand by me in return. I've said before, I don't like what this is turning you both into, and this just fucking drives it home. You can take your magic and your Jedi mind tricks and your dead people's souls and you can just fucking shove all of it, all right, because when you start fucking with my girlfriend and the mother of my child that's it, that's enough. Go home. I don't want to talk to either of you right now. I might not want to talk to you again for a really fucking long time."

JC opened his mouth and fought for something, anything, to say. He couldn't find it. Lance sighed, next to him, and said, "We'll respect that, Joey, because we love you. And we do love you. If anything starts to go wrong, or if you need any help with anything, you call us. And until then, we'll leave you alone, all right?"

"Yeah, fine," Joey said. JC knew it, he knew the tone, knew the way Joey got mad on the slow burn and then exploded and needed the time to cool off and come back to his senses, but it didn't help to know it when it was directed at you. "And if I wasn't so fucking mad right now I'd probably say I love you too, but right now I'm going to just say go home and I'll deal with you both later once I've calmed down. If I calm down."

"Fair enough," Lance said, and tugged JC out of the door by his wrist.

"You didn't shield him," JC said, once the door shut behind them. "You didn't block him off from any of it. He's going to go nuts, with the magic and without any way of controlling it."

"I was touching him in the cab," Lance said. In the halogen of the street-lights, his face was pale. "I did it then. I had a feeling he wouldn't let us stick around for long."

"I didn't feel it," JC said.

Lance glanced at him from under lowered lashes. "I didn't want to bother you with it. And I wanted to see if I could shield what I was doing from you, if I needed to. I'm not -- not really comfortable with the way we seem to be falling into each other."

JC wondered why Lance would want to hide something from him. Then he wondered what Lance considered a "bother". Then he just decided he'd worry about all of it later -- which he'd been saying too much, tonight, but it was the kind of night where everything just kept piling on until "later" was the only thing you could say without going insane. "He's really mad," he said.

The streetlight made Lance's cheekbones stand out, sent his eyes into shadow. "He'll get over it. He's alive to be mad; that's the important part."

"I shouldn't have done that to Kelly." JC scrubbed a hand over his face. "I -- I don't even know why I did it. Not really. She was just there, and I could, and I thought it would be --"

"It's better for her not to remember it," Lance said. "You've done the memory spell on people before. The human mind just isn't equipped to handle things like that for very long; she would have forgotten it herself, if you'd given her enough time to start convincing herself it couldn't have happened."

JC closed his eyes. He had way too much to think about, and his brain felt numb, like someone had dipped it into liquid nitrogen. Later. There would be time later. "It feels like everything's falling apart," he said. "It feels like everything's fucked up."

"Things don't always end perfectly with everything all tied up neatly; sometimes they just stop," Lance said, and started walking down the street, heading toward Sixth Avenue. JC trailed along a few feet behind him. "If I didn't teach you that, I didn't teach you well enough. It isn't all always hearts and flowers at the end, and you don't always ride off into the sunset, happily ever after. We're all alive, we're all mostly okay, and everything else can be dealt with one thing at a time."

"Where are we going?"

Lance sighed. "We'll go get a hotel room for the night, or something. And then we'll wake up in the morning, get back to Orlando, and see if there's anything else we need to clean up. And then we'll start working on some way to try and untangle the magic from Joey, because I really don't want to leave it there if we can find any other way."

"I don't either," JC said. "He's right. He shouldn't have to deal with it."

Lance was used to not being noticed in public except when he wanted to be, and that, JC thought, was what let him slip his hand into JC's and hold on, reassuringly. "What you said was right," he said. "It was the only way. And there are times when the ends justify the means, and this is one of them. He's still alive, Jayce, and it's thanks to you. Whatever else you beat yourself up over, keep remembering that."

"I will," JC said. "I just -- I don't know if it was right. I mean, I know it was necessary, but I don't know if it was right. And I didn't need to do that to Kelly but I did, and I -- I just don't like some of the things I've caught myself doing because I can do them, not because I need to do them. I don't --" He stopped himself before he said "I don't like the thought of turning into someone whose worldview is as pragmatic as yours," because he couldn't think of any way to phrase it without being offensive. He didn't think Lance would understand, anyway. "I just," he said, feeling lame and inarticulate. "I just have a really bad feeling about what it might wind up costing us all."

Lance stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to face JC. "This job makes you do a lot of things you don't always like," he said. "All you can do is keep the final goal in mind."

The final goal? JC thought. Or your final goal?

But he couldn't find the strength to ask it, and in the end he just held up a hand to hail the cab.

*

His head came up quickly, because he was somewhere he hadn't been when he'd fallen asleep. He was sitting on a curb, on the street of that shining city, and he didn't know what he was waiting for but he was waiting for something. It was quiet, and he squinted against the early morning sunlight.

She was standing across the street, watching him, and he stood up the minute he realized she was there. "Why am I here?" he asked. His voice cut across the preternatural stillness, and it seemed to leave little angry hissing trails behind it.

She didn't move. "Because your test is over."

"Test?" He stalked across the street. She didn't flinch as he came near her. "You're telling me that all of this was a test? Some kind of -- All of this was -- planned? By --"

"It happened as it needed to happen," she said. "All things happen as they need to happen. But you have the free will to make your own choices, and your own decisions, and that is what makes it a test. That is what makes everything a test. We do not plan; we only carry the message. You are the ones who choose whether or not to heed it."

"I don't like being pushed around," he snapped. "I'll do what I need to do, because I can, because I have to, because it's there and someone has to do it. But don't push me around, and don't lead me by the nose, and don't play with my life or my friends' lives." Echo of a night in the rain, of screaming at the sky, of getting no answer.

She shook her head. "We are not the ones to whom you must say that," she said. He thought he might have heard sympathy in her voice, just a touch, but he was too angry to really register it. "But we are the messengers. We will carry the message. The water runs in both directions."

"Stop being cryptic with me," he said. "Stop trying to jerk me around. Look, I already said, I've said so many times: Here I am." Each word fell, neat and precise. They seemed to echo against the buildings in a way his other words had not. "You don't need to manipulate me. All that'll do is make me resent all this even more."

She turned away from him and tipped her face up toward the sun. He noticed, dimly, that she didn't squint against it, didn't close her eyes. "The one question everyone has in common is 'why me'," she said. "And there is never an answer, other than: you, because things fall the way they must. Your test is over. Your work is about to begin."

"What's that supposed to mean?" He wanted to take her by the shoulders, shake her until she said something that meant something, something more than platitudes.

She turned back to face him, and he could see the fire of the sun burning in her eyes. "When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away," she said. It felt like a quote. It had the echo of something he should have known. "For now you know in part, but then you shall know, even as also you are known."

He balled his hands into fists. "Just give me a straight answer."

She brushed the tips of her fingers against his cheek. He hissed and stepped back, because her touch burned like ice. "For now, you see through a glass, darkly -- but you have done all you could do, and you've done well. You do not feel as though it is over, because you feel there is more that you must do. And there is, but you have not left any piece undone. For now, it is done. You must wait. It won't be long. And you'll be ready."

"Wait for what?"

But she was gone, and he turned in a slow circle, and he could see nothing more than that unreal city as far as it stretched before him.

notes

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