If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

      -- I Corinthians 13

i. and the lord's hand moves on the scheme of my nerves

Trace leaned over Justin's shoulder and started handing out glasses. "I still don't know why you couldn't get your own damn drinks," he grumbled. "I mean, just because you're all rich and famous pop stars --"

"And a Broadway star," Justin corrected, pointing at Joey. His cheeks were flushed, and he couldn't stop grinning, like he was more proud of Joey than Joey was of himself. "Man, did you see him? Did you see him up there?" He threw back his head and laughed again, then reached over and dragged Joey into a headlock, scruffing his knuckles over Joey's hair. "That's my man we're talking about!"

"I was kinda sitting right next to you, J," Trace said, tolerantly, and handed JC his bottle of water. "You sounded damn good, Joe."

"I went flat in 'Goodbye Love' and couldn't get it back for like, the rest of the show," Joey said.

"You couldn't tell," Justin assured him.

"Well, I could tell. I could hear it, I just couldn't fix it. I was too busy trying to remember the damn blocking."

"It was your first night! You're allowed to be nervous on your first night, even if it's not really your first night. Opening night jitters, right? I mean, everyone gets it." Justin bounced in place in the booth. "And fuck, but you had me sucked in. All of you. You've got such a damn good group of people."

"You starting to get opening night jitters of your own yet?" Joey asked.

Justin's shoulders tensed. "Yeah, hello, we're not talking about tomorrow night yet. If I think about it I'll freeze up. Tonight's about you, anyway. You rocked house on that stage. I'm still blown away."

"Hello?" Trace leaned over and waved a hand in front of JC's nose. JC jerked back and re-focused his attention on the group. "Chasez, you in there?"

Justin snorted. "He does that sometimes. Space cadet, remember? You should be used to it by now."

"What?" JC blinked, and then focused. He'd been paying attention to the conversation, but he'd also been paying attention to the little voice in the back of his mind that was slowly developing -- too slowly, really, for him to be comfortable with it. It took him a second to remember where he was and what he was doing. "Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I'm here. Just -- thinking about something."

Justin's lips thinned and he looked away. Joey reached out and closed his hand over JC's wrist reassuringly. "You gotta bail?"

JC shook his head automatically, and then stopped, re-considering. The tugging sensation was getting worse and worse. "I ... think I might. Are you okay with that?" He would have added more, but Trace was sitting right there, and no matter how much Justin trusted Trace, there were some things that should stay within the family.

"Yeah," Joey said. "Go. Fight the good fight. Truth, justice, and the American way. Keep the world safe for widows, orphans, and small fluffy dogs -- " Justin pinched him. Joey punched him right back. "No, seriously, go and take care of whatever it is. Give us a call when you get back, see if we're still here or not."

JC nodded and slid out of the booth. His mind was already on other things, but he remembered to stop and lean over to kiss Joey on the cheek. "You did sound great tonight," he said. "In case I forgot to tell you."

"You did forget," Joey said, and smiled. "But I could hear you thinking it."

The night outside felt like summer, like the last few gasps of heat were refusing to flee, but JC could smell autumn underneath it waiting to step in. It was just past midnight when he looked at his watch. He winced. He was trying to remember to stop at midnight and meditate, observe, and pray, the way Lance had told him would be useful for him at first, the way ritual magicians had been doing for millennia. Too many things to remember. Too many things to try and hold on to, all at once.

You're never going to have the same senses as someone who was born to it, Lance had said. But you'll find your own ways of working with it. I can teach you what works for me, but it might not work for you. I don't know. Nobody's ever done this before. I can't know what'll come of it.

Three days of talking, of waiting. Three times Lance had asked are you sure and JC had replied with yes. Three days before the ritual.

And now JC walked down the streets of Manhattan, with his fists balled up in the pockets of his jeans. "Lo tir'eh ot," he whispered, the words fitting strangely in his mouth, and the people around him moved out of his way, merging into the complicated dance of New York pedestrian traffic, but none of them took a second look. The neon lights cast a pink and orange glow on the sidewalk, and JC wondered where he was going, what he was being called to do.

When she ran headfirst into him, he was more startled than he should have been; nobody should have been able to see through the spell he'd crafted. His hands came up automatically to catch her. "Hey," he said. "Hey, easy. What is it? What's wrong?"

She tipped her face back and looked up at him. For a second, he was terrified she was going to figure out who he was and it would only make things worse; but she seemed to already know. Not what he did, but who he now was. "I need help," she said, her voice low and urgent. "They're in trouble. It's my fault. I need help."

The tug in the back of his head spiked, and then settled. He hummed a line of Hebrew under his breath, trying to calm her down.

"It's okay," he said. "Come on. Show me what's wrong."

Three types of magic, Lance had said. They'd been in Lance's workroom; JC had been sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall. All of them come from God, just in different ways. Psychic magic, which is natural and inborn. Everybody's got at least some of it, if they only paid enough attention to use it. Sorcery, or common magic, which is what everyone thinks of when they say "magic"; spells and stuff like that. And the magic I do, the holy magic. That's another story altogether.

"You have to help me," she repeated, and wrapped her hands around both his wrists and pulled. "I followed the instructions. Just the way they were written down, I did what I should have done, and it didn't work, and now Katie's in there and there's this thing --"

The holy magic is creation, renewal. It's like antibodies for the universe. It patches the holes. Fixes the illnesses. Takes care of the hundred little things the Name cannot always be there for.

"What were you trying to do?" JC asked.

She shoved a lock of hair out of her face. She couldn't have been more than seventeen, eighteen; the panic made her look older, but there was youth in her eyes. "All we wanted was to get Brian to notice Katie, and I found this book --"

Sometimes, a sorcerer, one of the common magicians, will tap into something that he or she can't control. Something rips, or tears, or just goes wrong. Fixing it is one of the things the holy magic is there for -- piecing together the broken things. Calling upon the power of the Name to act as God's hands, to make all the little corrections God's too busy to pay attention to. That's the part of it I do.

"It's okay," JC said. He was starting to feel it now, the slick hot sense of wrong behind his eyeballs. It was coming from one of the apartment buildings nearby, and he was almost certain that it would be the one she was tugging him towards. "I'll take care of it. Just show me where to go."

And since you don't seem to have the sense God gave little green apples, that's what you'll be doing now, too.

Had Lance known? JC wasn't sure. He didn't know if it was easier to believe Lance had, or that Lance had no idea.

*

Lance hadn't wanted to talk about it, but JC had come into the room just as he'd been finishing up a conversation. There'd been something in his voice, in his eyes, to make JC realize it was more than just another casual business deal.

"Who was it?" JC asked, collecting his coffee and trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes.

Lance had been staring out the window; JC's words seemed to snap him out of some trance. "The Russians came through," he'd said.

JC had stared at him for a few seconds, and then realization dawned. "The space thing?" he asked, and when Lance nodded, he let loose an excited whoop. "Lance, that's great, that's amazing, that's the best thing that's happened all year so far --"

But Lance wasn't smiling. "I can't take it," Lance cut him off. "I can't leave you on your own with less than a year of training. Because we might have dealt with the last set of shit going down, but there's always the day-to-day stuff, and I can't leave you alone to handle it. You remember what I told you. Once you start becoming aware of it, you can't give it up and go back. You can't un-learn what you've learned. You're going to be a target, Jayce."

JC had just shrugged. "I knew that when I signed up," he said. "You told me when this all started. I knew it, and I said I'd do it anyway. I mean, I won't last long without you recharging me, especially not with how quickly doing stuff burns through my power, but I can at least do something. Leave me here, leave me in charge, and go and do what you need to do. Fuck, it's not like whatever's in charge would hold you back from the chance to chase after your dream."

"I can't," Lance said. "What you do, what you know, that's not the right kind of magic. You know the sorcery. Some of it, at least. Some of the stuff I've picked up to make the rest of it easier. But that won't be enough to handle the patch-work I have to do."

"I can banish Nephilim and close portals with the best of them. It's practically grunt-work. You don't need to worry, Lance."

Lance's voice had sharpened, as though he were talking to a particularly impatient and slow student who refused to listen to what the teacher was saying. "No, actually, you can't. You can do it when I'm there, because I'm the one who can set it up for you, but you couldn't do it alone. You can't see what you're doing, you can't manipulate any of it. I can't leave you here with a big fat target painted on your back and no way to tap into the holy magic to fix things." He'd closed his eyes. "And banishing the Fallen isn't the only thing I do. It's just what you've seen me do, since -- well, since everything happened. There's so much more to it. So much more that I can't explain, except to say it involves putting right things that have gone wrong."

"So teach me," JC said. He'd tucked his feet up underneath him in lotus and watched Lance pace. "Teach me, and leave me here, and stop acting like you're going to have to give up the thought of everything you ever wanted just to stay here and -- I don't know, babysit me. Babysit the world around you."

"I can't. It's not possible to give someone the holy magic if they're not born to it. Either you're born with it, or you're not."

JC shook his head. "You said you were going to find a way to give me something. So I didn't have to work half-blind and half-deaf the whole time."

Lance had sighed. "Yes." A pause, barely long enough to hear; JC might have been imagining the reluctance in Lance's tone when he continued. "And you could just keep on working normal sorcery, the way you have been, with me feeding you power and letting you handle the little things to free me up for the big things, but that wouldn't work for long. Which is why I've been researching."

"And you've found something." JC had sat up straight. He knew that tone. "You found something, didn't you. Some way to do it. Some way to give me not just the senses to perceive sorcery, but to do the holy magic too."

"Not yet," Lance said. "I've been looking, but I haven't found anything yet."

JC couldn't tell if Lance was lying to him. He rather suspected Lance might be. "Well, keep looking. Because I'm not going to let you get away with brushing me off."

Lance shook his head. "You don't understand. You don't understand what it would do to you, what it would obligate you to do. I can't do that to you. I -- If I go, which I don't think I will, I could call someone. Somewhere. Call my mother, bring her in and have her take over the work. I'm not going to put it on you, though. You're good enough at what you do, if I'm there to power you, if I'm there to feed you, but even if I could give you the holy magic, I wouldn't leave you half-trained and with half-assed protections while I'm halfway across the globe."

It had pissed JC off. "My protections are not half-assed. You said so yourself, I'm better at this half-deaf and fully blind than some people who have been studying this stuff for years."

"I'm not saying --" Lance had interrupted.

JC didn't stop talking. "You're not going to pin all this on being worried for me, Lance. I know how it works, I know you're supposed to carry this sacred burden on your own, but I told you then and I'll tell you now, there is nothing that could keep me from watching your back now that I know what's going on and what's going down. So you're going to come up with something to help tie me into whatever mystical power source you use, and then we're going to do it, and then you're fucking well going to turn your ass around and go and fulfill your childhood dream and you're not going to give two seconds' thought about whether or not I can mind the store while you're gone, you got it? Because I can and I will and that's been the whole damn point all along."

There had been silence for a second. JC could see that Lance was thinking of arguing, but he kept his eyes on Lance's and kept his jaw set firmly and willed Lance to believe he was serious.

"I'm not going to put you into any more danger than you're already in," Lance had finally said.

"Baby," JC said. "I put myself there."

Lance's eyes had snapped. "And I'm not going to make it worse."

"Find a way," JC had said. "Because I'm not letting you pass this up, and if I have to find a way myself, I will."

*

It was only a chaos elemental; JC could have dealt with it in his sleep. The girls were terrified, though, and JC privately thought a little bit of terror would do them good. Keep them from messing with things they didn't understand, at least. For a little while, if not forever, and maybe in that little while they'd learn more caution.

He actually almost liked chaos elementals. They weren't much of a danger, only a nuisance. It was refreshing to be on a call that didn't involve mortal peril. He cleaned up after himself, made sure the girls would remember they'd done something stupid but not quite remember that someone had come to save their rear ends at the last second -- it wasn't good for people to believe there would be a cavalry riding to the rescue, Lance said, because it made them sloppy -- and called Joey, who was on his way back to his apartment and said he'd leave the light on until JC got home. All in a day's work.

Except the elemental had said something to him, before he had sent it back to where it came from, and he turned it over in his head while he was trying to hail a cab. Pick up, pack up, get moving; you tore it, you have to patch it whole. It's coming.

He didn't have any clue what the fuck that was supposed to mean.

Bach's Mass in G Minor kept running through his head. He wasn't having much luck hailing a cab, so he gave up; he wasn't far from a subway station, and Joey's place was three blocks' walk away from -- oh, the blue one. He could never remember how the New York subway system worked, but hell, he'd know it when he saw it. The don't-notice-me was still active, so he didn't even bother trying to get the attention of the lady in the token booth. He was pretty sure there was a MetroCard in his wallet, and if there wasn't, well, he always felt guilty about jumping turnstiles, but he wouldn't get busted for it.

You figured it out, didn't you. You found something.

Maybe.

JC stifled a yawn; it was getting late, even for him. Lance hadn't had time to teach JC his trick for getting by on four or five hours of sleep a night. He leaned against the wall of the subway station and closed his eyes. Too public to try to recharge, but at least he could take a moment before the train arrived to relax somewhat.

Well, tell me what we're going to have to do.

It's not that easy.

It still itched in the back of his head, like a buzzing, like the way one note out of tune felt in the middle of five-part harmony. For a minute after he climbed onto the subway train and took a seat, he thought it might be the hum of the engine, but it didn't change pitch and frequency when the train jerked back into motion. JC rubbed the sides of his eyes and pressed his fingertips against his temples; there was no way to scratch an itch that didn't actually exist. He could stand ten solid hours of sleep and a day or three without worrying about anything other than what was on the television.

The woman sitting across from him on the subway car glanced up from her book, scanning the car the way native New Yorkers learn to do; her eyes brushed past him, then stopped and returned. He dropped his eyes and chanted under his breath again: lo'-'iyra'meribhebhoth 'am 'asher sabhiyhb shathu alay, with a hint of suggestion behind it. She looked back down at her book, unconcerned. JC hoped that someday soon his Hebrew pronunciation would improve, at least to the point where Lance didn't wince every time he opened his mouth and then look guilty and try to hide the expression.

There's two parts to the magic I do. And you have to be born to both of them. There's ways to work sorcery without having the inborn talent, but they're dangerous unless there's someone there with the sense of it, to keep you from burning through everything that keeps you breathing. Nobody's ever found a way to work the holy magic without the talent for it, though. And if you're serious about wanting this whole crazy mess, and I don't know why you would be, you'd need both.

No way to scratch an itch that didn't actually exist, except to realize it was trying to call to that sense of duty buried deep within. The train pulled into the 50th Street station, and JC was on his feet before he could even process the fact that he was moving. Something else was calling to him; something nearby, muffled by shields or wards or something, but whatever it was, it needed him to go and take a look.

Twice in one night was rare, but not unheard of. In a city the size of Manhattan, with only a few people like him to take care of the things that could go wrong -- and there were a lot of things that could go wrong -- he wasn't surprised to realize there was something else he had to do. He slid his backpack up his shoulder, feeling the weight of the supplies it contained tugging at him, and stifled another yawn. At least he'd be able to sleep in, in the morning.

So you've figured out a way to do it.

It's just not possible to give you what I've got. That's inborn. You've either got it or you don't, and you don't. I could give you ... something, though. It's a lot more left-hand path than I usually handle, and it'd hurt like a motherfucker -- both of us -- and it wouldn't give you everything and it might backfire. But I could give you something. Something close.

Then do it.

You don't know what you're asking for.

You don't know what I'm offering.

As soon as Lance had told him, had told all of them about his other job, the one that didn't involve singing and dancing in front of an audience of screaming teenagers, there had been no doubt in JC's mind what he was going to do. It was simple, really; you didn't leave a brother to stand against the wolves with nobody watching his back, no matter what form those wolves might take. He didn't understand all of it, and Lance never seemed to miss an opportunity to remind him of that fact -- never in an unkind fashion, but still. JC had been satisfied to act as a kind of magical battery to power what Lance had been doing, at first. There were things you could do even if you couldn't feel them, and Lance had said that if you had a strong enough will, you could change some things even if you couldn't feel them changing.

JC had always had a very strong will.

It was that strong will that kept him from turning around and heading back down the stairs, walking out the door and hiding from the image that presented itself to him, when he followed that wordless tugging into a nondescript apartment building and let himself into the corner apartment on the fifteenth floor with the simplest of lockpicking spells.

The girl couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen years old. The room was sharp with the scent of it, heavy and metallic. Half her skin was missing, there were lines of chalk and sticky browning blood on the floor, and he could feel the presence in the room, the malevolent something that had been stirred up and only partially taken away with whomever had done this.

He breathed through his mouth and tried to ignore the way the runes on the floor made his stomach twist. He reached for the purity of the prayer to serve as a shield, meha'olam ve'adh ha'olam, and it helped, a little. A very little.

Think, he told himself, as the sense of urgency hit him. Think, you aren't going to have much time. The calm clarity of his own mental voice in his ears reminded him of what he needed to do. Salt and holy water around the doors and windows to contain whatever had been raised. From Hebrew to Latin for the dispelling; his Latin pronunciation was better than his Hebrew, and with something like this, he didn't want to take the chance. "Qui scit comburere aqua et lavare igne facit de terra caelum et de caelo terram pretiosam," he whispered, and reached for the fire no one else could see.

The crawling fetid stench of the room lifted enough to let him think a little more clearly. It would linger on; nothing he could do would make it go away completely, but whatever had happened in this room, whatever he hadn't gotten there in time for, would no longer be dangerous. Not enough time, no time to do what he should have done, but he did have just enough time to carry away what he could, so he could study it later. He pulled the notebook out of his back pocket and scribbled down the runes, taking care to make just enough of a mistake in transcription that whatever lurked in their depths wouldn't transfer itself to him, before upending the bottle of holy water over one of them and scrubbing with his foot.

"Police, freeze," the voice came from the door, sharp and unsteady, just as he was finishing up. JC turned to find a squat man with dark skin and uneasy eyes, wearing a police uniform, looking at him as though he were debating reaching for his gun. "Don't move. Don't fucking move. Kos, call for backup, we've got a situation here."

A year ago -- six months ago -- that would have sent JC into a panic. Now, he just shook his head. "No," he said, softly, and reached for the music that slept inside him. "Find who did this to her, if you can. But I was never here."

The detective shook himself as JC slipped past him, as though waking from sleep. JC shoved the notebook back in his pocket and let himself out of the building.

It wasn't the first time he'd been somewhere someone had died, but it was the first time he'd been the only one there who could have stopped it.

What do we have to do?

It's in the blood. It's all in the blood.

*

Joey and Kelly had rejected JC's offer to stay at a hotel the minute he'd made it; they'd only let Justin get away with it because Justin came with entourage and as much as they all liked Trace, he didn't have much of a concept of how to act around the baby. JC was different. JC was a pretty decent houseguest, as long as you didn't mind his occasional moments of total space-out. Not to mention the nights when he'd come stumbling back in at five in the morning, looking lost and forlorn and smelling of sour sweat and fear as he let himself in with the loaner key.

Joey was waiting up, because he always waited up when someone he loved was out and about. He liked knowing they'd gotten home safely. He uncurled himself from the recliner in the dark, clearing his throat as softly as he could to avoid startling JC -- he'd learned not to startle JC the hard way -- and struggled to his feet. The last remnants of the night's alcohol were sparkling at the edges of his vision, and he tried to keep himself from yawning.

JC turned to look at him, and Joey thought that if it wouldn't be inaccurate -- at least, he hoped it would be inaccurate -- the only word to use to describe him would be "haunted". "Joey," JC said. Joey could hear it in his voice, the thick low dread. JC blinked a few times, as though Joey were some kind of mysterious apparition, and half-stumbled to lean against the doorframe. "Joey."

Joey didn't know what went on, those nights when Lance and JC disappeared and came back looking tired and drawn, and he didn't really want to know. "Bad?" He came to stand next to JC, resting his hand against the small of JC's back and rubbing lightly.

"Bad," JC said. He was trying to keep his voice down, and he flinched ever-so-slightly away from Joey's touch. Joey figured that meant whatever JC had dealt with, whatever JC had had to do, had left him feeling stinking and crawling and filthy, like it had wormed under his skin. "Really bad."

"What was it?"

"Some kind of -- sacrifice, I think," JC said. Joey winced. "She was young. Really young, Joey. I don't --" He fumbled at his back pocket, pulled out a notebook and pressed it into Joey's hands. "Take this, okay? Just -- take it away from me for a little while. I don't want it near me, I don't want it around me, you can't feel it so you're safe to hold on to it until the morning, I just want to --"

Joey put the notebook onto the bookshelf behind him. "Jayce. It's okay. Come on. You go and take a shower, I'll make you a cup of tea, you can tell me about it. You look like a fucking ghost." He touched JC's cheek softly. JC's eyes were hollow in the half-light spilling from the open bathroom door in the hallway. "Come on, man, you look wiped."

"I didn't get there in time, Joey." JC shook his head and looked down at his hands. "The cops were there, but I didn't get there in time to save her. I was too late."

"You can't save everyone, Jayce," Joey said, as gently as he could, and nudged him towards the townhouse's guest bathroom. "Come on. Take a shower. You'll feel better, you know you always feel better after you take a shower. Then you can tell me what you need to tell me, enough to get it out of your head, and then you can try to sleep. It's in the police's hands now."

JC caught Joey's wrist in his hand, turning it over and running his fingers along the veins that stretched there. Joey held back a shiver. He'd seen JC this disturbed before, had been there for the aftermath of nights very much like this, but there was just enough of the otherworldly in JC's eyes to make him wonder what it was that JC had seen this time and wouldn't share. "You know what the worst part of all this is, Joey?"

"What's that?"

"It was human. Whatever it was that did that to her, it was human."

Joey closed his eyes and tried not to picture anything. Joey had seen JC like this before, but never without Lance there to take care of him. Joey didn't know quite what to do, what to say. "Then it's best to let the cops handle it. You can't be everywhere, JC. All you can do is your best."

JC took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. His fingers clenched, then relaxed against Joey's skin. "Lance would have been able to make it in time," he said, and shut himself in the bathroom before Joey could think of something to say in reply.

The shower hissed on a minute later. Joey closed his eyes and thought of Kelly, of Briahna, asleep behind another closed door. The notebook JC had handed him was small and spiral-bound, sized perfectly to fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans. It was bent slightly, and the cover was shiny where it had rubbed against JC's ass day after day. He flipped past the grocery lists and half-finished lyrics to find what he knew must be there, and copied the symbols down before JC finished washing himself as clean as he could.

*

It had started out of simple curiosity, and a desire to do something instead of just standing there.

New York City was full of antique bookstores. Joey was the first person to admit he wasn't the world's greatest bibliophile, but there was something about walking into a room and being faced with row after row, shelf after shelf, of mismatched and aging spines. There was a particular smell, the smell of old books and dusty corners, that always made him think of lazy afternoons spent in a public library in Brooklyn, reading old plays and trying to figure out how to get into Jo DiConstanza's pants.

He'd made the list of which stores might have what he was looking for out of the phone book when he first moved back to New York. None of them would be it, of course; the kind of place he was looking for didn't tend to advertise. But maybe one of them would be able to point him in the direction he needed to go.

Kelly had watched with amusement; years ago, she'd accepted that there were some things in the world that could only be categorized into the box of "Joey is sometimes weird", and had displayed a marvelous facility at recognizing those things and putting them into that box when necessary. She hadn't batted an eyelash when he'd taken that carefully-constructed list and visited each of the twenty stores in order. Some of them had been easily crossed off, of course. Nothing showy. Nothing public. He knew when he started that the place he wanted had to exist, and he knew with just as much certainty that it would not be listed in the phone book or on the Internet. But he had no other place to start.

He could have asked for help -- he still remembered where to go, and whom to ask -- but something told him he was better off on his own, for this. Everyone he'd met when he'd been trailing along behind Lance had been polite enough, but there were no guarantees that would continue to be the case.

When he finally found it, it was after spending more time than he could count traipsing all over the five boroughs. He'd been into and out of more New Age and mystical stores than he thought any city, even one the size of New York, could support, and none of them had been it. But he'd been standing between the bookshelves of Magickal Realms, head tipped to one side, studying the spines of the two or three books that might have contained something of use to him, when someone had cleared her throat next to him.

She was tall and thin, all leg and elbow, and dressed like a refugee from the Salvation Army. "I've been seeing you in and out of the usual haunts this month," she'd said, giving him a direct stare.

Joey had nodded. "Looking for someplace that carries stuff that isn't likely to come out of mainstream publishing houses, if you know what I mean."

She tilted her head and chewed on her lip and he thought for a minute that she was looking right through him. "Yeah," she finally said. "I do. Give me your hand."

He'd put his hand in hers, expecting some kind of mystical and showy demonstration of something or other, but she'd just pulled out a pen and written an address on his palm. The nub dug into his skin, but it wasn't painful, just odd. "Tell him Zia sent you," she'd said, and turned to walk out. The heat of the New York City summer had blurred the lines of ink with sweat by the time he could write them down on a more permanent medium, but they'd still been legible enough.

Once he'd started looking for it, once he'd had his attention called to it, he began to notice it more and more often. Never overt; never showy. The ones who wore it on their sleeves were, he suspected, the ones who were giving Lance and JC the headaches to begin with. But every now and then, someone would give him a sidelong glance in a store, or watch him with interest on the subway, and he got used to differentiating when they were staring at Joey Fatone from when they were staring at him for another reason. He still wore the jewelry Lance had done something to, protected or blessed or something, and occasionally he would be walking down the street and something not-quite-right would catch him out of the corner of his eye. This was the world Lance walked in, the world JC was learning, and Joey wondered if they could see it on him, too, if being aware of it was enough to change you.

Whatever it was, it and the girl's name had been enough to let him in the back room of the tidy and nondescript used bookshop. He hadn't thought to look there, not for what he'd been trying to find. Hadn't pictured the mundane and prosaic shelves of Harlequin romance novels and science-fiction pulp, or the tightly-locked case containing first editions from Dickens to Dumas, or the smooth old white-haired and bearded man wearing, not the stereotypical tweed jacket, but black jeans and a t-shirt with a cryptic string of 1s and 0s across the chest. Hadn't expected to be escorted behind the counter, led through the door to the back room and down the old and rickety stairs, and left to browse for as long as he would like.

Joey had been very grateful for his bank balance when, four hours later, he had emerged with his arms full of carefully-chosen references (some hand-copied, with notes in the margins in languages he didn't speak, rough-edged and unevenly bound and each of them looking like it might be the only one of its kind that still existed in the world) and Adam, the proprietor, had tallied them up and named a number that would probably cover the store's lease for three full years. "You look to be furnishing a library," Adam had said.

"I'm, uh, trying to fill in some gaps in my knowledge."

Joey had expected to be questioned further, but Adam had simply nodded and lifted each volume with reverent hands into a box on the counter. "If you're in need of translation services, I can place you in contact with several people who do such things."

The books were thick and dense and heavy and at first, it took him an hour to work through three or four pages, squinting at the crabbed and heavy script. It gave him a headache, and more than once he considered just dropping it all and going back to blissful ignorance. After a few days of it, he started keeping notes in a spiral notebook that he kept next to the volumes on his desk. He couldn't make heads nor tails of half of it; every book seemed to contradict every other book, and sometimes they contradicted themselves. Halfway through, he had to close his eyes and fight the urge to toss them out the window; it was driving him that crazy.

But he was going to get through this, and he was going to learn something while he was doing it, and he was fucking well never again going to get stuck in a situation where he didn't understand what was going on. He'd had enough of that in his life and he'd promised himself, after Lou, that once was enough. He knew there were people he could go to for help, but that felt like cheating.

Kelly had just sighed softly and started keeping her New York Times bestsellers beside the bed, in order to leave him room on the shelves.

Joey wasn't even sure why he was doing it. Oh, he told himself it was because he wanted to know, to understand, but that wasn't all of it. There was a little bit of him, just enough for him to recognize it, that missed the days when Lance used to look up to him for answers -- about girls, about life, about everything. Somewhere along the line, that had stopped, and after what had happened on the second half of the tour, it felt more like he was running along behind Lance, trying to catch up, trying to at least build a common vocabulary so they could discuss things at all.

"What's this?" JC had asked when he'd visited, standing in Joey's living room, his hand on the cover of one of the books, looking up to meet Joey's eyes. JC still held onto enough of his upbringing that he would never handle someone else's property uninvited, no matter how curious he was.

Joey had looked away. "Just some stuff I've been reading lately."

JC had frowned. "Joey, that's not exactly light bedtime reading."

"I know, all right? I'm just -- I want to help, that's all. I don't want to do it. I just want to understand it." It had sounded stupid, coming out of his mouth, like saying it made him realize how unlikely it was that he'd ever have something to contribute.

JC's eyes had softened, though. "Just be careful, okay? Come to me when you finish these, we'll talk it over. Lance says that every single book that's ever been written down, unless you're getting personal journals and sometimes even then, is about sixty percent bullshit."

"I have a pretty good bullshit detector," Joey had said, and ended the discussion by stacking the books on the bookshelf behind him and going to order Chinese food for lunch.

*

Chris hit town just before the lunch rush, showing up at Joey's with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, a pair of sunglasses perched on his forehead and displacing the mohawk, and a serious case of driver's tan. Within five minutes of arrival, he'd thumped Joey on the back, called Justin and told him to get his skinny white-boy ass over there, spun Kelly around and dipped her backwards until she shrieked and clutched his arms to hold herself up, and held Briahna upside-down and blown raspberries on her tummy until she had dissolved into helpless giggles.

"Good to see you, too, man, but shush. C's still asleep." Joey pondered rescuing his daughter, but Chris's grasp was always strong, and there were few people in the world Joey trusted as much as he trusted Chris to take care of something precious and irreplaceable. "And be careful with Bri, she's got a cold."

Chris stilled immediately, flipping Bri back right-side-up and soothing her disappointed whimpering by sticking one of his pinky fingers in her mouth for her to suck on. "Oops," he said, not really sounding contrite. "You guys out late partying?"

"He got unexpectedly called away," Joey said, and Chris's eyes flicked to Kelly before he nodded. "We missed you last night."

"I tried to make it," Chris said. "There was just no way. I didn't realize when I agreed to do that stupid pageant thing that it'd conflict."

"No, no. It's cool. Did you see Lance while you were down there?"

Chris shook his head. "He already had JC visiting, and I couldn't find the time to detour up to Houston from SPI. Texas is fucking huge, man. Figured I'd catch him next time they ship him back to the States, or head on over to Russia before he goes up even if it takes a bottle of Valium to get me there. You heard anything about how he's doing?"

"He's doing okay," came the sleepy voice from the door, and they both turned to see JC standing there, running one hand through his hair. Chris whooped, passed Bri over to Kelly with a deftness that spoke of way too many hours spent holding babies, and bounded across the room to gather JC up into a hug. JC exhaled sharply as Chris impacted, and then there were a few minutes of limbs and lips going on, while Joey met Kelly's eyes with a resigned air of "well, it's just Chris."

When they disengaged, JC wrapped one arm around Chris's waist, finished nuzzling his neck, and then headed for the kitchen. Joey looked for signs of the previous night's upset, but JC had his company face on, and Joey couldn't tell what he was thinking. "How old's the coffee?" JC called.

"Joey made it around nine," Kelly said. "And -- shit, I'm going to be late for Bri's appointment." She passed the baby back to Chris, and ducked into the other room to grab the diaper bag. "Chris, is Justin coming over?"

"I don't know," Chris called back, and, free of the need to watch the noise level, turned Briahna upside-down again. "I woke him up, so even if he is, it won't be for a while."

"Well, I was just seeing if we were going to need more food in the fridge." Kelly came back out with diaper bag in tow, saw Chris holding the baby upside-down, and sighed, more tolerant than upset. "Chris, if you drop my plague-ridden daughter on her head, you're never welcome in this house ever again."

"Fate worse than death!" Chris proclaimed, and handed Bri back over to her. "I couldn't live without seeing your fair face ever again. If you ever decide to drop the ape over here, I get first dibs."

JC came out of the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. Kelly hoisted Briahna up on one hip and tucked her feet into her shoes. "If you ever decide you're going back to girls, I might just take you up on that. I'll be back in a few hours. Try not to burn the house down while I'm gone." She leaned over and kissed Joey before she left.

The minute the door clicked shut, the atmosphere in the room shifted. Joey looked over to JC and said, "I woke up early and managed to figure out some info on the stuff you found last night."

JC's shoulders twitched, like he'd been trying not to think about it. Chris looked back and forth between them like a trapped rabbit. "Bad shit went down?"

"Bad shit went down," JC confirmed, and leaned one hip against the desk. "I didn't ask you to look stuff up, Joey."

"Yeah, and you didn't ask me to make sure there was coffee left over for you when you woke up, now did you, but that doesn't mean I didn't make an extra-large pot this morning." Joey leaned over and picked up the sheets of notes from his morning research. "I couldn't find a lot on it. I guess I don't have the right books. I can go and talk to my guy later on this afternoon if you want me to."

"Your guy?" Chris looked back and forth some more. "Joey, you have a guy? When'd you get a guy? Jayce, what the hell happened last night? Nobody tells me anything anymore."

JC's lips twitched. "Well, you know, if you ever answered your cell phone, we might."

"I answer the phone when I'm not stoned off my ass. My caller ID isn't working so I don't know if it's my mother, and you know she gets upset when I don't share my weed with her. You're ducking the question." Chris kicked JC's foot lightly. "What happened?"

"Someone died," JC said. The words were tight and small, sharp contrast to his humor of just a few seconds ago. He put the mug of coffee down on the desk with a hair more force than was truly necessary. "I was too slow and too late and someone died. Joey, I don't want you in on this."

"We've been through this." Joey crossed his arms across his chest. "I dropped the ball the first time, I'm not going to drop it again. This is part of your life, and it's damn well going to be part of mine, too."

Chris held up a hand. "Not meaning to get into the middle of this, but I've been wandering across the country. Someone want to fill me in on what's been going on?"

Joey transferred his attention to Chris. "I've been doing some reading -- okay, a lot of reading. I don't understand a lot of it, but I can at least summarize and hand it over to someone who does understand it. JC doesn't want me involved, he says it's too dangerous." Joey had wondered, at the time, whether JC realized that had been the same argument Lance had used on JC.

Chris frowned. "You mean you're doing magic too?" He seemed to have trouble saying the word "magic", like his mouth was getting in the way of itself. Chris had, perhaps, been a little more affected by his brush with the supernatural than he would let on.

"No," JC said, quickly. "He -- it's like Lance said. You're either born with it, or you're not."

"You weren't born with it." Chris tilted his head.

"No," JC repeated. "I wasn't." He set the paper down next to his coffee mug. "And I don't really want to talk about how I got here, because first, I'm not Lance and I don't feel like talking for ten minutes on something I don't think you guys really want to hear, and second, I'm trying pretty hard to totally blank it out and never think of it ever again, okay? I'm really tired; I'm going to go back to sleep. Wake me up if we're doing anything."

Chris waited until JC was out of earshot to look back at Joey. "Perhaps this household should consider switching to decaf."

"He was out late last night." Joey fought back the urge to defend JC. "And I think this is really getting to him."

"I told him this would fuck with his head." Chris sighed and shook his head. "What got you into it?"

"I told you. I wanted to help." Joey didn't want to get into all of the reasons, though, not even with Chris, so he temporized. "It's pretty interesting, all of it. I mean, the books are rough going in places, and it's not like I speak any of the weird languages that half of them are in, but, you know, I can be a research monkey just like anyone else."

Chris quirked one eyebrow and then wandered over to browse the bookshelves. Joey was keeping the books he'd been collecting on the top shelf, as though by keeping them high and away, they'd somehow be less dangerous. "Hey, answer me this." Joey made an affirmative noise, and Chris tipped his head back over to look again. "Is he right? Do you have to be born with it?"

"Yeah," Joey said, and then amended, "Well, yes and no. It's -- it's kind of hard to explain. I don't know if I'm really right or not, but I'm getting some different stories from this stuff, and it's -- I mean, Lance was talking like magic was just one thing, right? And C does the same thing. But what I'm getting is that there are really three kinds of magic, and one of them -- sorcery -- is divided up into as many different types as there are -- well, types of music."

"And?" Chris prompted.

Joey's breath hissed out in a sigh. "And some of those types you have to be born to, just like Lance said. Some of them, anyone can wake them up if they try, because you have to have the talent for them but everyone has some latent talent for some part of it or another. Some of them you can do without the talent for it, but it's harder, or it costs more. And some of them are, like, really fucking scary, what you have to do to get them to work, especially if you don't have the inborn talent for them. And I think that's what Jayce stumbled onto, last night." Joey picked up the piece of paper JC had left on the desk and looked at it. "I think he found someone who doesn't have the magic, but wants it. Wants it enough to kill for it."

Chris frowned. "That's possible? To get all of this by -- what, killing someone and eating their powers?"

Chris's tone was as flippant as he could make it, but he was actually almost right. "Yeah," Joey said. "It's possible. The books talk about it, it's like -- Look, I don't know what I'm talking about, you know? I could be totally wrong. But see, there are three different types of magic. There's what everyone now calls psychic powers. Just about everyone's got the potential for one or more of those talents, they're just sleeping, and you can wake them up if you know what you're doing. Seeing stuff in the future, or, like, the laying on of hands to heal other people, or knowing stuff about what other people are feeling. Stuff that comes entirely from inside you, and is powered by your own natural energy, all of which kind of replenishes itself as you go; you kind of take it in from everything else. And then there's what's called true magic, sorcery -- the stuff with actual spells and rituals and stuff. That stuff uses an entirely different internal power source, and you need a bunch of different skills for it, you need to be able to memorize stuff and manipulate the power flows and -- well, I'm babbling."

Chris was listening, though, and Joey figured it couldn't hurt to keep going until Chris stopped him. "Some of the same stuff can be handled by psychic gifts and by sorcery, just in different ways. But, see, the biggest thing you need to do sorcery is the -- hold on, let me try and find the way this book put it." He picked one of the books out of the stack on the desk itself, flipping through the pages as quickly as he could without risking damage. "Here we go. This author didn't know about the third type of magic, but it's a good summary still. The spelling is shit, but this is what I'm talking about: 'The sorcerer is the rarest of any who seek to understand the arcane arts, for he' -- they weren't all that big on women's lib back then -- 'is the one born with the gift to see the world as it is, not how man would make it, and the strength to draw the power required to change it.'"

"Uh-huh." Chris sounded dubious. "Is that supposed to make sense?"

"It does when you realize that all of these people talk in some kind of code. 'The gift to see the world as it is' -- I think that means that people with the talent for actual magic -- sorcery, this book calls it -- can see through illusion spells and sense stuff like whether or not there's magic being used. And can see the way their sorcery is working, whether or not it is actually working, correct it if it's going wrong, instead of just trusting to blind luck and faith that they've done everything right. 'The strength to draw the power' -- that's the hard part. The difference between sorcery and psychic talents is that the power for sorcery comes from the outside. A bunch of different types of outside power, from what I can tell, but from outside."

"So?" Against his better judgment, Chris was interested; Joey could tell. "Couldn't anyone draw on those power sources, then?"

Joey shook his head. "No, it's like -- well, the book used this awful analogy that would have made perfect sense in the fifteen-hundreds but took me forever to understand, but it's kind of like a well. People with the talent can use all the water in the well, and it's okay, because it'll fill back up ... however wells get filled up, whatever, sooner or later. People without the talent, it's more like a cup. Empty the cup, that's it, the water's gone. And you're in the desert, and while you're trying to find some water somewhere to refill the cup, you're gonna die of thirst."

"So when Lance started teaching JC, he was teaching him --"

"With JC working blind." Joey nodded. "Because JC didn't have it, he wasn't a sorcerer or whatever you want to call it, so Lance had to keep feeding him the energy and sort of guiding his hands. I think. I mean, Lance had to have been getting something out of it, or he wouldn't have been doing it. And he sure seemed less tired afterwards, so it wasn't like teaching JC was a big drain on him or something. And the holy magic, what Lance does, is apparently something else entirely, and I can't find much reference to it in any of these books. I do know you have to be a sorcerer to be a holy mage, but not all sorcerers are holy mages, and not all holy mages use sorcerous magic much, even if they can. And don't even get me started on the question of where all these different types of magic come from. But somewhere along the way Lance figured out a way to sort of put the sorcerer ability into JC, and that's what I can't figure out. All the books say it should be impossible."

"And he won't tell you when you ask." It wasn't a question; Chris knew them too well.

Joey sighed and shook his head again. Trust Chris to cut right to the heart of what Joey had been avoiding thinking about for weeks. "Nope. All he'll say is that he doesn't want to talk about it, because nobody should know it's possible." He paused. "And I think that's what we're dealing with here. I think whatever it is, it's ugly, and I don't like thinking about what it might have been. I think whoever this guy is that JC was messing with last night, he figured it out too. And I don't want to believe that about Lance and JC, but hell. I've been wrong about things before."

"That's why you started doing all this reading." Chris's voice was slow, like he was coming to the conclusions as he was saying them. "Because you want to know what they haven't been telling us, and you don't know whether or not you can trust them to tell us the truth."

Joey opened his mouth to deny it, and then stopped. "A little," he said, slowly. "Yeah. A little. I don't know, I hate thinking it. But with all the years that Lance wasn't telling us anything --"

"--you started thinking, once you found out what was really going on, that you didn't know if everything we thought we knew was wrong." Chris nodded. "Yeah. I've been trying to deal with that one myself." He offered up a wan smile. "I think I've mostly picked the fingers-in-ears-la-la-I-can't-hear-you approach."

"I don't think that's going to work in the long run, Chris." Joey could hear his own voice, serious and sober. "I mean, whether we like it or not, this is obviously here and around and we're going to have to do something with it. Something about it."

Chris flopped down onto the couch and looked up at Joey. "What do you suggest we do? I mean, it's not like we can just leap into the situation and start plugging away at stuff. It's like Lance says. Either you've got it or you don't."

"Maybe," Joey said. "Maybe not. Maybe we can find something we can do, maybe we can't. Maybe we can figure out what Lance and JC are doing, figure out how they're doing it, maybe we can't. I don't think sticking our fingers in our ears is going to accomplish anything, though."

"It'll make me feel better," Chris said, and that was the end of that.

*

There are rules. Rules about what you can do to other people without asking them first. Rules about what you should do to other people without asking them first. You'll find a lot of people have a lot of different rules about what's ethical and what isn't, but most of those are geared to sorcery, not the holy magic. The holy magic has its own set of rules, and because I'm powerful enough to be called Magus, I have another set of rules on top of that, too.

I thought you were supposed to ask first. Before you did something to someone. Before you changed things for them, with magic.

You are, really. But there are times when you can't, and times when you shouldn't. There are times when pragmatism trumps those ethics. Someone who's consistently and repeatedly abused his or her magic would never consent to having that magic removed, for instance, but if that's the case, you'd have to do something. There's always the greater good to think of. Not just the person's greater good, but the greater good of Creation as a whole. The cosmos as a whole. That's what we have to keep in mind.

But how do you know? How do you make that decision?

It's just one of the things to add to the list of things you ask God 'why me' about. It's one of the things you have to decide, and if you decide wrong -- well, you deal with it afterwards, the best way you know how.

That conversation played out in JC's head as he sat in the audience for the VMAs, waiting to go up and present. He winced, sitting in the middle of thousands of people all staring up at Justin trying to work his way through dance steps he hadn't yet learned bone-deep. Justin looked off, as though the nerves had gotten in between him and his music. JC had known it was going to happen.

He'd been standing in the hallway while Chris had knelt next to a pale and shaking Justin in Joey's bathroom, holding his head while Justin emptied the contents of his stomach into the toilet. JC only would have had to reach out slightly. Just a bit. Just a hand brushed over the back of Justin's hand, a phrase hummed under his breath, a tiny reaching out and setting right -- that would have been the only thing necessary to calm Justin's nerves enough to take away the fear and uncertainty.

JC had been the one to bring up the topic of ethics and consent. He'd seen Lance doing a lot of things that -- well, they weren't wrong, because they were done to fix things, on the larger scale. But it really did sit wrong with him, half the time, some of the things they did without letting the people they were doing them to know what was going on.

I mean, who are we to play God?

Those of us who carry the holy magic are entitled to play God, Jayce. We're God's hands, God's proxies. We're doing what God needs to have done.

A lot of other people have claimed to be doing God's will in the past, you know. And they did a lot of shitty things in God's name.

I know. Believe me, I know.

It kept JC up at night, sometimes, worrying at the problem like a dog worries at a bone, trying to come up with his own rules for when it was all right to act and when it wasn't. And then, standing outside Joey's bathroom and watching Justin turn his head and spit, watching Chris hand him a glass of water and make some half-hearted wisecrack to make Justin smile -- then, he realized all of his resolutions about leaving things alone unless it was absolutely necessary for him to act were all well and good, but when it concerned one of the people he loved, they were so easy to push to the wayside.

He'd just shifted his weight, ready to reach for the magic and step through the door, when Joey had caught his wrist.

"Don't," Joey had said. JC looked over and saw the expression on Joey's face, the instinctive understanding of precisely what JC was struggling with. There was something else there, written underneath the understanding; something JC didn't understand, and didn't really like. Joey was looking at him like he was something new and strange. Foreign. "He wouldn't thank you for it. Not now, not even later. Not if he knew."

JC had caught his breath, feeling for a minute like he'd been broadsided, and then nodded slowly and went to get another glass of ice water and a fresh shirt for Justin to change into.

It didn't stop him now from curling his fingers into fists, trapped in the uncomfortable seat of yet another auditorium theatre -- and how many of those had he spent nights just like this sitting in? -- humming counterpoint under his breath and willing strength to Justin with every inch of his body. Maybe Joey had been right, but magic that couldn't be used to help out your friend wasn't very good magic at all.

"Well," Chris said brightly afterwards, "that didn't totally suck," and Justin shot him a death-glare. JC rested a hand on Justin's shoulder, and tried not to be upset when Justin jerked away.

*

Adam Pendleton, Ltd., Bookseller, was patiently dealing with a woman carrying her poodle under one arm and insisting in a sharp voice that she knew there had to be a copy of whatever bestseller was topping the New York Times charts that week tucked away somewhere behind the counter. Joey stood behind her just long enough for the dog to growl at him and for Adam to shoot him a glance that said yes, I know. He made a tiny gesture, Adam nodded back at him, and he slipped around the counter and through the door to downstairs. Behind him, the woman's voice grew even more shrill, demanding to know why he had been allowed through. Adam's voice, soothing and calming beyond all human limits of patience, was so low that Joey couldn't make out the words.

Sometimes Joey wondered where Adam had found all the books in the basement, why Adam kept them. Some of them made the nape of Joey's neck crawl, even if he couldn't understand what they were saying. With some of them, you didn't need to be able to read to know they were dealing with things you just plain old didn't want to think about. It was as though something in the fabric of the pages, the leather of the covers, spoke of a sleeping malicious potential.

Joey'd asked Adam, once, why he kept those books, in among the stuff that dealt with more run-of-the-mill types of magic. Adam had sighed and said, "The ones who are working against magic like that need to know. Information isn't the problem. It's how the information is used." It had seemed like the old "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, and it sat wrong with Joey -- so much of this sat almost-wrong with Joey, little echoes of things that could be used in so many evil ways -- but he'd let it go.

There hadn't been much to go on, for the symbols JC had brought home, but there had been a few hints and suggestions. Joey knew he could spend the entire day rummaging through books, skimming for some mention of what he needed to know and hoping his tired eyes didn't miss the one reference buried in the middle of a ninth-century text, but he didn't have all day. He didn't have the magic in him, and he didn't want it there, but that didn't mean he hadn't found one or two spells that he was willing to use. Spells he could use, even without being able to feel them.

He blocked out the sounds from upstairs, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. The words slept just underneath his heart, like they wanted to be spoken. He didn't even know what language they were in, but in spite of that, he could pronounce them properly; the minute he'd laid eyes on them, he'd known. It wasn't the language that mattered; it was what he was asking for -- praying for -- behind it.

The last syllables rushed out from his lips like a soft breath, and his knees were a touch weak behind them. He couldn't add it up, but he knew he'd just spent a fraction more of that otherworldly currency. Someday, he knew, he was going to run out. He figured he'd deal with that when he got there. It was a little spell, so small that the long-dead author of the book he'd found it in hadn't bothered to cloak it in metaphors and half-truths. It didn't count for much. It didn't cost much.

Power. It was all about the power; having the power, being able to sense the power, being able to direct and use the power. Joey thought he understood, just a little, why someone might be willing to kill for the ability to do things like that. Cut a few corners. Save a few minutes. Save a lot more than a few minutes, in a few cases.

Adam came down the stairs with two steaming mugs of tea in his hands just as the final hints of golden light faded from the books Joey was pulling from the shelves. It hadn't been long enough for the spell to wear off, which meant Joey had found everything containing any information that might be of use to him. The stack on the table was depressingly large. "Indexing spell?" Adam asked, nodding to the books, and handed over one of the mugs of tea.

"I kind of think of it as the magical Yellow Pages. You know, let your fingers do the walking." Joey dropped down into one of the chairs; Adam kept the study table down here because half his customer base made less in a year than some single books cost, and Adam was always willing to let people drop in and look up a few things. It didn't stop him from selling the books, of course, but he was willing to serve as librarian while he was waiting for someone to come along and take them home. "Did you manage to lose the diva?"

"Yes, and locked the door behind her. God save me from dealing with idiots." Adam tasted his tea and made a face. Joey hoped it was from the memory of dealing with the woman, and not the taste of the tea. "You've got an eclectic assortment here. What are you dealing with?"

Sometimes Joey thought that Adam, if confronted with the end of the world happening in his backyard, would just push up his glasses, shrug, and start handing out books about it. Adam had, one or two times, been a godsend, pointing Joey directly to the books he wanted before he even knew what they were. That had been before Joey had learned the index spell, and he still tended to view Adam as a sort of magical encyclopedia. Joey didn't even know if Adam knew who he was; he didn't seem like the type to follow the pop scene.

They'd spent some time drinking together a month or so ago, when Joey had been trying to find some good references on first-century Ephesian Goddess-worship. JC had been dealing with a cult claiming they were resurrecting the tradition. They hadn't, but they'd managed to tap into something three planes over and more than slightly unpleasant. It had been tough for a while -- it was one of JC's first big solo projects -- and Joey'd pulled every spare moment he hadn't been in rehearsal to help. Adam, apparently deciding Joey had passed some sort of test, had come down with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses and they'd stayed up half the night, well past the store's usual closing time, pulling books off the shelves and talking through what it could possibly have been.

"I don't know," Joey said now, and ran a hand over his head. The tea was warm and tasted slightly of damp plants. He wasn't sure what it was, but it wasn't half bad. "C ran into bad shit the other night. He couldn't tell me much, but he looked pretty spooked afterwards. I copied down some of the symbols he brought home, figured it'd be a good idea to stop in and see if any of these --" He gestured at the stack of books with one hand. "-- had anything to say about it."

"Hmm. May I see?" Adam held out one hand for the copy of the runes, and Joey shoved it across the table without thinking twice. He'd learned, that night, that Adam had been raised in a strongly magical family but had gotten next to nothing of the talent himself. His family didn't produce holy magicians, but sorcery ran in bloodlines too. Adam had once said snide things to Joey about his younger brother, who was apparently the family hotshot, and then never mentioned it again.

In return, Adam knew that Joey had a friend who'd somehow managed to get thrust into the middle of things without much preparation, and was more than willing to help out by providing as much information as possible. "Hmm," he said now, squinting at the lines. "Old magic. Blood magic, judging by the feel of these."

"Yeah." Joey nodded. "And if how weirded out he was by it is anything to go by, bad magic. He said someone died."

Adam's mouth twisted. "For things like what this feels like, someone always has to. Be careful, all right? Things like this happen in pairs. Or more. People who are working with magic like this -- well, it's addictive. You get a taste for it, they say. Like a need, under the skin."

Joey wondered if all magic couldn't be described like that, in the end. "Great," he said. He'd been pretty sure of that, but hearing it from Adam didn't make him feel much better. "So we're going to have more dead bodies on our hands?"

Adam nodded. "Most likely. And whatever the dark mage is trying to do -- well. He -- or she, though they're not usually female -- may not be working toward something in particular. He may just be drunk on the power, unwilling to give that up. But it's been my experience that there is always a greater purpose, in the end."

"Great," Joey said again, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. "Look, I hate to ask this, but if this all goes down and we can't handle it --"

"Unfortunately," Adam said, and there was true regret in his voice, "I wouldn't be of much use. Except possibly to turn pages, and you seem to have that well in hand. Of course, if you need another pair of eyes -- well, that much I'll always help with. But I'm afraid this kind of magic is well out of my league. My family's more nature magic, not blood magic, and we all know I fall in the last-and-the-least end of the spectrum. Information, yes. Assistance, probably not. If you're in desperate need, I could possibly call in some old favors for you, but I wouldn't even count on that. Manhattan summers are a bad time for sensitives; most of them try to get away from the press of all the people and the heat." "Yeah," Joey said. "I wasn't really counting on it. C tends to get called in on the kind of things most people can't do much about."

Adam nodded again. "The ones who have the holy magic are like that. So many people don't even know it exists, much less how to handle it or how to handle the things it's needed for."

Joey sighed. "Yeah. I know a few people I could call, in an absolute emergency. Not too many, but a few. Unfortunately, our guy is out of town too. Way out of town."

"I'll keep my ears open. A great deal of information comes through my doors; if I hear anything that may be of use, I'll let you know." Adam nodded to the mug. "Drink your tea; it's getting cold. And then I'll help you carry those upstairs and figure out how much of your bankroll is disappearing into my pocket."

"It's a deal," Joey said.

*

Justin was sitting at the kitchen table with one of Kelly's romance paperbacks in one hand, alternately turning pages and eating a slice of leftover pizza with the other, when Joey came home lugging the box of books. "C said to tell you he'd be back late tomorrow," Justin said, mouth full, without looking up from the book. "And Chris disappeared. Said something about the East Village, record stores, you know Chris and vinyl. I think he and C are fighting again."

Joey raised an eyebrow and dropped the box on the counter. "What makes you say that?"

Justin shrugged. "Chris slept with me last night, not with C, and you know I'm not anybody's first choice. I steal the covers. Is everything okay?"

Joey closed his eyes and wondered if he was going to have to take the time to mediate some kind of internal warfare, too. He stayed out of the complex dance of who was sharing whose bed at any given time -- not because he didn't swing that way (theoretically, he did, even if usually it was only after a few beers and when Kelly had given him permission in advance) and not because he didn't find any of his bandmates sexually attractive (he wasn't blind and he wasn't dead, after all), but simply out of some small lingering belief that you didn't fuck around with the people you had to work with. He had the sneaking suspicion that Chris's choice of bedmate last night had nothing to do with whether or not he was getting along with JC, and everything to do with the fact that Justin had needed him in a way Justin hadn't needed him in years, but it wasn't his place to interfere. "You're the one who just told me JC and Chris were fighting again, shouldn't you be the one who tells me whether everything's okay or not?"

"Not like that," Justin said, and put down the book. Joey wondered when Justin had picked up a taste for bodice-rippers, and decided it would be safest not to ask. "I meant with, you know. The stuff we don't talk about. And don't look at me like that, I was only reading it because it was sitting right here on the table."

They always said JC was the one who lived in another world. Sometimes Joey thought it was only because they were all so familiar with Justin's world that it didn't seem weird to them. "I don't know what's up with that, that's what I've been trying to find out. Did C say where he was going?"

Justin shrugged again. "Some kind of thing in Southampton. He didn't ask any of us to come out with him, I dunno. I'm heading back out west tomorrow, I've got this press thing next week in LA and I think I'm gonna take some downtime with Alyssa first. I was gonna try to get out here for the club thing you're doing, but I have to stick around for the launch party."

Joey immediately felt like a jerk. He'd forgotten about what was going on with Justin's album in the middle of everything else. "Shit, that's already? I didn't think it was so close."

"Believe me, Joey," Justin said, "I wake up in the middle of the night knowing exactly how long until then." He was pale under his tan, and Joey wondered if he'd been sleeping at all. "We still on for the end of the month? Assuming that the world doesn't end before then."

"Don't even joke about that," Joey said, shocked. "Don't even -- it's not funny, Justin."

"It used to be." Justin shrugged and picked the book back up. "Grab me another slice of pizza when you go by the fridge? I couldn't eat a goddamn thing yesterday and my body's trying to make me pay for it now."

*

JC's phone buzzed against his hip just as he was starting to relax. He pulled it out, saw the number was Lance's just as it rang through to voicemail, and knew he'd never be able to find enough peace and quiet in the club to listen to the message or take the call. He excused himself from the table; P. Diddy, holding court, barely even noticed him go.

Outside, the air held that late-August dead humidity, like it was thinking about raining but wasn't thinking about it too hard. He checked the message quickly -- nothing more in-depth than "hey, it's me, call me back when you've got a second" -- and dialed before he could talk himself out of it.

Lance answered in between the second and third ring. "Wasn't expecting you to call back so quickly," he said, not even bothering with a greeting. Recently all of their conversations had started to feel like continuations of each other, all of them eventually bleeding into one.

The sound of Lance's voice brought back thoughts of the late-afternoon Texas summer humidity. The way that Lance's breath had sounded in his ears, as JC bent over him and mouthed at his neck. The way he'd felt, for the first time since they'd started sleeping together so many years ago, that Lance wasn't holding anything back. The way it had felt like they'd been melting into each other, dissolving, with the thrumming throbbing feel of magic trading back and forth between them, echoing and reflecting, enhancing each of their senses in a synergy that left JC feeling like he'd been falling into nothingness. He'd never thought, never dreamed, that sex with anyone could break down his boundaries like that.

It had been the first time he'd slept with anyone since the night in Lance's workroom, and for the first time he understood why Lance had always seemed to be holding something back with all of them, before. He would have done the same thing. It hadn't been unpleasant, but it had been uncomfortable. Lance had seemed just as shocked as JC had been, and they'd carefully avoided talking about it afterwards. JC had caught himself holding back from reaching out to Lance, the next day, as though just the simple act of touching could throw them into that identity-dissolving union again. "Nah, it's cool," JC said, leaning back against the building. Keep it light; keep it casual. They'd work out what the heck was going on between the two of them on the personal level later, once Lance got home, once everything was out of crisis mode. "Just out clubbing with a bunch of people after the party, nothing major. Is something up?"

He could imagine Lance standing in the middle of the room they'd assigned him, pacing back and forth, holding the cell phone up against one ear. "That's what I was going to ask you. I've got this feeling. Like an itch under my skin. It feels like it's connected to you somehow. Is anything going down?"

JC closed his eyes. He had been intending to call Lance yesterday, but their schedules hadn't overlapped enough for him to get Lance in person, and it wasn't the kind of thing one trusted to email or voice mail. "Well, it's been mostly quiet. A few things, nothing major or stuff that I can't handle. Except --" He bit his lip, and tried to think of a way to phrase it.

"Except?" Lance's voice was soft and steady, encouragement in his ear.

"There was this -- I walked into something on Wednesday night. Blood magic. Bad blood magic. There was -- there was a victim. She didn't make it." JC tried to keep his voice as neutral as possible.

"Shit." There was a soft exhale from the other end of the phone, and JC could practically see Lance dragging a hand through his hair. "Motherfucker. When did you get there? During, or after?"

"After." Shame burned in his throat. "I felt it while it was happening, I think, but it wasn't strong enough to make me think it was real and I wasn't imagining it, and by the time I got there --"

"Stop beating yourself up over it." The command was soft, but it was a command nonetheless. "Warded?"

"Yeah. Strong wards. Really strong wards."

"That's why, then. You're never going to be as good at sensing through wards as someone who was born to it. It's a miracle you can sense it when it's practically being scrawled across the sky. Did you clean up afterwards?"

"Yeah," JC said again. "And I got the symbols written down. I was going to scan them in and send them to you, see if you had any idea. They're not anything I've ever been exposed to."

"Yeah, I'll take a look, but I don't have a lot of my reference stuff out here with me. They sort of make you travel light." Lance chuckled, then sobered again. "You can call my mom if you need someone to go through books looking for stuff. She's getting itchy skin about you too, I think -- if you need anything, don't hesitate to call her. She doesn't want anything to happen to you."

"Actually," JC said, after a pause, "Joey's been sort of helping out." He'd told Lance about Joey's new choice of reading material, and Lance had just hmmed thoughtfully and then seemed to set the matter aside. "He's apparently found somebody he can trust to give him information, and God only knows where he's getting all these books but he's always got something useful to contribute. Even when I tell him I don't want him involved."

There was another pause, and then Lance hmmed again. "Well, I suppose -- information won't hurt, no matter where it comes from. You should still check in with Mom, though. And you can always go down and talk to Kei, if you need another pair of eyes. I'd advise against talking to Ojiisan if you don't have to, but if you need to, he can probably find you someone who hasn't bailed on the city for the summer. Do you need me to come help?"

"No," JC said quickly. "Dude, you're flying back to Russia in what, six hours? I can handle it. I can. It was only the once --" and oh, it burned under his skin, guilt and shame at not being able to get there fast enough, but he hid it as well as he could -- "and I'm on the lookout for it now. I'll know how it feels if it happens again. And maybe next time I won't be too fucking slow."

Lance sighed. "Be careful, all right? Remember that stuff like that isn't just magical and spiritual. If you walk in on something you're not ready for --"

"I'll be ready for it." JC tried to put a hint of iron into his voice. "And I'm not trying to play the hero here. I know what I'm capable of, and I can handle it. I promise you, I'll call the minute I have anything. The guy left a lot of mess and a lot of crap, but nothing that could possibly be used to trace him. I checked. If it happens again, I'll feel it, and I'll find some way of nailing his ass. I will."

"Okay," Lance said again after a long minute. "I'll email you some of the stuff I have for tracking shit like that if you can get to the scene again, or if it happens again. Just -- be careful, all right, C? If you need me for anything, call. I hate dropping you in the middle of all this without me."

"I know you do, baby," JC said. "And you know, I kind of hate it too. But I'm good. I promise."

"Okay," Lance said. "I'll call you when I get back over there, okay? Love you."

"Love you too," JC said, but Lance had already hung up. He stared at the cracks in the sidewalk and hoped he hadn't sounded anywhere near as uncertain as he felt.

Hearing Lance's voice had stilled the little narration in the back of his head, the memories that had been running in endless loop, as though the reality of Lance had pre-empted the recollected version of him. It left him feeling empty, though, to hang up the phone, like a part of him was missing. He was halfway across the country, and it wasn't the first time that they'd all been separated, but something was missing when Lance wasn't around.

JC slid the phone back into his pocket and tried not to wonder what would be different if Lance were there.

*

JC got back to Joey's late Sunday night, after Kelly and Bri had already left for their flight back to Orlando. He wondered sometimes how the long-distance thing was working for them, and why Kelly hadn't just quit her job and moved up to Manhattan full-time, but he thought he understood the need to do something on her own, not just as an extension of Joey. And it wasn't as though Joey couldn't afford weekly plane tickets.

Joey was sitting up, sprawled out on the sofa in the living room with his feet on the coffee table and an old and heavy-looking book in his lap, when JC unlocked the door and kicked off his shoes. He looked up and blinked, stifling a yawn. "Wasn't expecting you back tonight."

JC shrugged. "Didn't feel like staying out any longer. I mean, it was just a party." He dropped his bag in the foyer and kicked it under the table. "Why are you still up? Didn't you have a show tonight?"

"Yeah, but I got home and I didn't feel like sleeping. And I have a lot of stuff to read through, and we've got Mondays off, and hey, it distracts me from the fact that Kelly and the rugrat went home." Joey patted the couch next to him. "C'mon, you look wiped. Settle down with me for a bit and unwind from having to be all public and stuff."

It sounded like precisely what JC needed, and he nodded. "Let me just go lose these clothes. You want anything from the kitchen?"

"Grab me another beer," Joey said, but he'd already turned his attention back to the book in his lap, and JC smiled and went to change into loungewear. Things had been kind of weird between him and Joey for a few days, but this, this was familiar.

He handed Joey a bottle of beer, then settled in and picked up the book that was topmost on the stack. It was half in English, half in Latin. He'd been learning Latin (in his copious spare time, he liked to say whenever the subject came up), but he couldn't remember more than half the words without a dictionary, which he didn't have with him. He settled down to lie across the couch with his head in Joey's lap and his knees draped up and over the arm of the couch anyway, propping the book up on his chest. Joey petted his hair with one hand and turned pages with the other, and it was almost like being back on a bus, if he squinted and concentrated on nothing more than the pages.

He was deep into the treatise on magical power sources, rubbing the tiny and nearly-faded scar across the base of his thumb, getting more and more uncomfortable as things were reminding him of that night a few weeks before Lance left for training --

Are you sure you understand? Are you sure you know what this is going to do to you?

Are you?

-- when the pain arced through his skull like electricity. There were a few minutes where the world around him was nothing but blinding white light. When he could think again, he was on his knees on the floor. Joey had his hands on JC's shoulders and was repeating endless variations on the phrase "C, look at me. Look at me, C."

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," JC chanted, the minute it cleared enough to let him speak. "Fuck, I gotta go -- I have to --" He didn't know what it was, but it was pulling at him, like a hook under his skin tugging him relentlessly toward the east. "I have to go. Now."

Joey hesitated for a second, and then nodded. "Okay. I'm coming with you." His voice didn't leave any room for argument. "Come on, get your stuff."

JC pressed his palms firmly against his eyelids, willing the headache to go away. "You know I'm not going to let you."

"And you know that you still can't navigate in Manhattan worth shit without getting lost. Plus, all I'm going to do is follow along behind you, so let's just cut this debate and move. You lead." Joey stood up and held out a hand. "You look like you can't even walk straight right now, much less figure out where we're going. Come on, I've got your back."

No time, no time, no time to wonder what Joey was really thinking -- "All right," JC said, and pulled himself to a standing position with Joey's help. He took a deep breath and then held out his hands. "May I?"

Joey looked confused for a second. "May you what?"

"Protections. Wards. Stuff to keep you from being a target if you're near this with me. Stuff to keep you from being noticed while we're doing this. I have to ask before I do it."

Joey's eyebrows stayed raised, but he didn't take more than half a second to answer. "Of course. You've got my permission for anything you think is necessary, C, you know that."

"I have to ask," JC repeated, and then touched his palms to Joey's cheeks. The spell coiled in JC's chest, waiting there for him to sing it into life. He'd always thought of protection spells as Mozart, unsure why but it just seemed to fit, and he layered the wards on top of Sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam, quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus from the Requiem sung out clear and pure. His headache flared again as he dropped his hands, but Joey just looked at him steadily, ready for anything.

"Come on," JC said, and turned around to grab up his backpack full of stuff as they hit the door running.

Joey had the native New Yorker's skill at hailing cabs, and he guided JC into the backseat before asking, in an undertone, "Any idea where we're going?"

JC closed his eyes and tried to get a sense of where they were and where they were going. "East. East and south, by water."

"I don't suppose these Spidey-senses come with a street address?" Joey asked, but he was already leaning forward to talk to the cabbie. "Not sure where we're going, man, but just take us down Sixth and then over to Lower East. We'll tell you when to turn."

The cabbie gave him a dubious look, but clicked the meter on anyway. JC leaned back against the leather seat and breathed, trying to empty himself of everything but that call. "Turn left here," he said, after a few minutes, and the cabbie obliged. "And ... two or three blocks south, and then right."

It was Manhattan; the cabbie had probably seen twelve stranger things before breakfast. The car was silent except for the radio and the driver singing along with it; JC absently noted with the part of his mind reserved for such things that the man was ever so slightly off-key. They were close, so close, when he leaned forward. "Slow down," he said, and made a show of looking out the window as though he was checking for street addresses. It was throbbing under his skin by now, the way a wound pulsed with blood-flow. The buildings were cheap housing, and trash was strewn on the streets and sidewalks. "Here," he said, and the driver stopped.

"Thanks, man," Joey said, and slipped a few bills through the window. "You okay, C?" he added in an undertone.

JC just kept breathing. "Yeah," he said. "I'm --" He slid out of the cab, stepping up onto the curb, looking around and trying to fix himself firmly in this world. The sense of something broken was strong, so strong. "Just -- stay behind me. And don't touch anything. And don't say anything. And don't --"

"I get the picture," Joey said.

JC took another deep breath and made his way up the steps to the door of the building that was singing to him the loudest. It was locked, of course, but the lock fell open under his fingertips with a whispered "aperite". He pushed his way through with Joey following him. The hallway was dark: reeking of urine, covered in graffiti. Up two flights of stairs; it was coming from the last apartment in the back corner. JC could sense the heartbeats of the other people in the apartment building, silent and tucked away and minding their own business.

Never open a door before checking to see if it's warded, and what's behind it, Lance's voice whispered in his memory. He rested his palm flat on the door, and then jerked it back as quickly as he could when he felt the roiling magic behind it. "Fuck!" slipped out from between his lips. "Fuck, fuck, fuck --"

Joey (who was looking around them nervously, watching out, JC imagined, for physical danger rather than magical) laid a hand on JC's arm. JC jerked back quickly, hissing. Joey just wanted to reassure, he knew, but he was so hyper-sensitive, listening, reaching, that to be touched at all was agony. "Sorry," he muttered, quickly. "I just -- don't touch me --"

Joey let it go. "Okay. What's wrong? What's in there?"

"Remember what I said I ran into Wednesday night?"

"...Yeah."

"It's back. Or rather, the aftermath of it is. There's at least one dead body in there, and a whole lot of ugly magic, and I'm too late again." JC curled his fingers into fists. "Fuck." He bit off the word and curled his fingers into his palms.

Joey's first impulse was always to touch, but he checked the motion and shoved his hand behind his back. "You gonna be able to handle it?"

"Are you?" JC shot back. "Do you really want to see what's behind that door?" It was always easier to face things like this alone, but he didn't want Joey to have to go through it with him.

Joey met his eyes. "I said I was with you, I'm fucking with you."

"All right, then." JC brushed his fingers over the lock, and it too sprang open beneath his touch. The magic washed over him, thick and heavy and malevolent, and he couldn't tell if it was blood or smoke or incense or just plain evil he was smelling. Joey's presence behind him, bright and clean and pure, was the one thing that kept him upright as he stepped through the door.

Behind him, Joey stopped dead on the threshold, and JC couldn't tell if it was from the blood and viscera spread out on the floor or if Joey could sense the presence of the magic too. It snapped and twisted and burned in his veins. This time the victim was a man, probably in his late twenties, and as JC desperately tried to block out the crawling fetid wrongness, he slowly realized that there were old wards around the room, the faint remnants of lines of white light that had been shattered into a thousand pieces by something older and stronger than they were.

"Holy Mother of God," Joey breathed, crossing himself. Some amount of sense reasserted itself, because he shut the door behind him. JC knotted his hands into fists again as the miasma doubled, having no way to escape, but it was precisely what he would have told Joey to do: shut the door to keep that power from creeping down the hallway and getting loose. The other inhabitants of the building would be sleeping poorly, haunted by nightmares of death and blood, as it was; he couldn't risk letting any more of it get free.

"Okay," Joey said, and came up to stand at JC's elbow. He very carefully avoided placing his feet over any of the lines of symbols painted in blood. "I'm, uh, thinking there's probably a lot of really bad mojo in here right now, am I right?"

"Yeah." Joey's presence helped; with Joey standing close enough for JC to feel that pure solid goodness he could almost think again. "I've got to dispel it. But not yet. I need to see if whoever did this left any clues --"

"Gimme your backpack," Joey said. JC blinked at him. Joey sighed. "Give me your backpack. I'll copy down the symbols and save you some time. I'm the one who's going to be looking them up anyway, it's better if I do it. You check for a signature, and see if you can find anything that'll lead you back to the sick fuck who's responsible for this. And then you can clean up the vibes or whatever and we can go home and take a shower and then I think I'm going to get really, really, really drunk, but I'm pretty sure I can hold off the panic attack until we get out of here." He licked his lips. "I wouldn't say no to working really quickly, though."

JC wondered if this had been how Lance had felt when JC had first wormed his way into this section of Lance's life, like everything was a little more okay if there was someone else there with you. "Yeah. Okay. Don't forget to make a few mistakes when you copy them down. I just -- God, I can't think in here. It's worse than forty thousand screaming teenagers."

"Nothing could be worse than forty thousand screaming teenagers," Joey said, with no small amount of gallows humor, and held out his hand for the backpack. When JC handed it over, Joey dug out notebook and pen, and then set to his scribe's task, carefully not looking at the body any more than he had to.

Freed of that worry, JC closed his eyes for a second, and then opened them again. It wasn't like the last time, where someone had already called the cops and he only had a few minutes to work. This was the kind of neighborhood where a dead body wouldn't be noticed for a few days, not until the smell ripened in the late August heat, so he had time. He had nothing but time.

A year ago he would have been just like Joey, looking at the scene with no senses other than the usual five, but a lot had changed in a year. He closed his eyes again to try and shut out everything that wasn't utterly necessary, and breathed the words. "Adonai qera'thiykha chushah liyha'aziynah qoliy beqor'iy-lakh."

When he opened his eyes again, the room was awash with traces of both light gold and sullen, wine-deep red. The gold was traced around the doors and windows, simple patterns that were broken and faded -- old wards, then, placed by the man who was now lying dead before him. They held the feel of someone who was quick and vibrant and full of life, someone who had little magical power but used what he could to protect himself and the people around him. JC could feel them snaking out under his feet and surrounding the rest of the building, and understood without having to reach further that this man had been the one to keep the residents of the building mostly sane, happy, and healthy. He wished he'd gotten a chance to meet him.

Whatever had broken those wards still lingered, pooling in the corners and dripping down the walls, but no matter how hard JC squinted at it, he couldn't get any sense of what was behind it. It felt like blood smelled, but there was no personality behind it, no sense of self. It was as though whoever had done it hadn't spent the time to clean up after himself, except to strip anything identifying from the power signatures that roped the room like an unpleasant net. There was arrogance in that, in using enough care to strip personal signature from the magic but not enough to clean up afterwards. It was almost as though whoever had done this was taunting him -- not him personally, but anyone who came along afterwards.

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Not even a hair on the floor or a piece of skin under the fingernails of the dead man. There was nothing in the apartment that shouldn't have been there except for the itchy crawling symbols scrawled across the floor in blood mixed with some sort of oil. JC fought the urge to put a fist through the wall and crossed the room in three measured steps to rummage through his backpack for the supplies he would need. Joey, looking decidedly pale around the edges, didn't look up from his notebook. "Anything?"

"Nothing." JC rubbed his eyes again and shook his head. "There's -- there's plenty of energy, and it's creepy as fuck, but there's nothing I can use. Nothing I can trace, nothing I can track -- it's like something just came out of nowhere and did this. Everything personal's been wiped away."

Joey pressed his lips together and continued scrawling symbols in pencil with a careful hand. "Is it just that whatever's in here is keeping you from being able to think straight?"

"Maybe." JC blew out breath from between his pursed lips. "I think I know why I didn't feel it until it was over, though. It's -- there were blocks up here. Not wards so much as -- containment. Whoever did this wanted to make sure none of the energy was wasted until he was done recharging." He realized he was using masculine pronouns, had been mentally since he'd walked through the door, and that felt right. "And then he dropped the containment and that's when I felt it. That's why I didn't get here until it was too late."

"You know, there's something that's really bugging me about all of this," Joey said, slowly. "And I might be totally off base here, and if I am --"

"You probably know about as much on the topic as I do right now," JC interrupted. "You've been doing a hell of a lot of reading."

Joey's lips curved quickly in a not-quite-smile, but he let it go. "Anyway. You said the guy wiped all personal traces, right?" He waited for JC's nod. "And there were spells up to contain it, too."

"Yeah. Big ones. With teeth. Enough to block me totally, and then give me the headache from hell halfway across Manhattan. I'm surprised more people didn't feel it." Maybe they had, and had ignored it. Maybe they hadn't. Lance had said that not too many people had that sort of sense, even if they could feel and use the magic; it was particular to Lance's own task, Lance's own gifts.

"Okay." Joey chewed on his lip. "But blood magic like this is usually used by someone who doesn't have the talent for sorcery at all, right? Someone who can't feel the energy, someone who can't pull the energy from where you and Lance get it from, right?"

"Right." JC had the feeling that he should have been able to follow Joey's train of thought, but his head still felt like molasses. He curled his fingers around the plastic bottle of holy water he'd dug out from the bottom of his backpack and tried to think of the best way to start demolishing it, start banishing that stink of unhealthy magic.

"So. I might be totally wrong." Joey took a breath. "But if someone's powerful enough to do that, because all the reading I've done says that stripping your own personal signature from magic is fucking hard to do --"

It hit JC between the eyes, like a flash. "Then he'd be powerful enough to tap the magic without having to use blood sacrifice to build up his power. He's a powerful enough magician that he's got to be a natural talent, he can't just be taking the power from his victims and using that."

"Which means --"

"That whatever purpose this has, it isn't for power. Or isn't only for power." JC felt dizzy, and it wasn't just from standing in the room with a dead body. "It means that there's something else going on here entirely."

"Fuck," Joey said. "I was afraid of that."

"Think about it later," JC said. "When we're out of here. Once I've got this cleaned up. Once it isn't dangerous for someone to so much as breathe the same air."

"Yeah." Joey limned in the last line in the notebook, carefully broken so it didn't transfer whatever the unknown adversary had been trying to build, and shoved the paper back into JC's backpack. "And, uh, speaking of that --"

JC nodded and poured a handful of holy water into his cupped palm. "Just be glad I protected you before we walked into this, or you'd be having nightmares for weeks."

"I think I've already got that covered," Joey said under his breath, but JC pretended not to hear as he dipped his fingers into the water and reached for the threads of magic that seethed around him.

*

JC let Joey shower first when they got home. When it was his turn for the hot water, he tipped his head back under the spray, closed his eyes, and tried to come up with any solution other than the obvious.

He couldn't, though. "I'm going to have to call Diane," he said, when he came out of the shower in a towel. "I really, really don't want to. But I'm going to have to call Diane."

Joey was already in bed, with books and papers spread out over the covers. He started stacking them neatly as JC emerged from the bathroom, and JC was grateful to realize Joey had no intention of putting him in the guest bedroom that night. It was probably as much for Joey's benefit as for his own, but there was no way he wanted to sleep alone. "Why don't you want to?"

"She, uh. Really doesn't approve of me getting involved in all of this." JC pinched the bridge of his nose and sat down on the opposite side of the bed. "Lance said she wanted him to tell all of us what was going on, back in Orlando at the very beginning, but I get the sense that it was more of a vague informational thing, not a hey, come get in on the action kind of thing. I don't think she trusts my motives."

"Jayce." Joey paused in stacking his papers and looked at JC. "I have a question, okay? And it's probably going to be really insulting, and I know you're not going to want to answer it, but I need to know, okay?"

With an introduction like that, JC knew exactly what Joey was going to ask. He'd been waiting for it for a while, especially with the looks Joey had been giving him over the past few days. He didn't want to answer it now any more than he'd wanted to answer it then. "I didn't ask you to get involved in this," he said. It wasn't an answer, but he knew Joey would take it as one.

"Yeah, I know." Joey took a deep breath and kept going. "You and Lance. When this all started you were -- I don't know, like I am now, totally non-magical. And then Lance announces that he's going to Russia and all of a sudden you're the Boy Wonder. And nobody's talking about how. I've done enough reading --"

"I know." JC drew his knees up underneath him to sit cross-legged, and sighed. "You can probably guess."

"I can guess. I don't want to be right." Joey leaned over and put the books and papers on the floor. He wasn't looking at JC, and JC was thankful for that small mercy.

There was a minute where nobody was talking, and then JC sighed again. "You see," he started, slowly, looking for the words, "blood magic isn't all wrong. It isn't all evil. It's not inherently good or bad, dark or light or whatever. You remember when we were dealing with all that crap back on the tour, when Lance was marking all the doors with his blood to seal us in and keep us safe?"

Joey nodded. "Yeah. I remember." His tone was neutral. JC thought "neutral" was about the best he could hope for.

"What you're reading is probably dwelling a lot on how blood magic is almost always malevolent. Done to other people, without their consent. Done for evil purposes." Joey nodded again, but he didn't say anything. "It isn't. It's a power source, and a way of -- It's old. Primal, in a lot of ways. One of the first kinds of magic that ever existed. And if you can tap into it with your own blood, or you have two people who are working it willingly, or in the most powerful scenario you have someone who offers himself up as a willing sacrifice -- that carries a lot of power. A whole lot of power."

"I'm with you," Joey said.

"Right. And there are a lot of in-betweens in the sort of magical scale of ethics, too." JC flashed back to that conversation with Lance, and couldn't decide whether to laugh or cringe at the thought that he was the one left to explain Lance's positions on the matter. "There's what we were dealing with tonight, which is -- black magic is such a loaded term, and it's not right, it's not that kind of duality, but yeah, what we were dealing with tonight is evil. There's no two ways about it. It's someone taking something from someone else without their consent and without their permission and using it for whatever, and it makes my skin crawl. And on the total other opposite side of it, you've got -- oh, what Lance does, holy magic, sacred magic. Or what some other people do, with earth magic or spirit magic or even just personal magic. But there's this whole huge grey area in the middle where intent matters."

"Right," Joey said, as JC took a breath. He couldn't read Joey's expression.

He was talking too much. He knew it, and he couldn't stop himself, but talking about theory kept him distant from talking about practice. About a specific practice. "And there are all these different types of magic, and they all come from God in the end -- God in whatever face He's wearing, because it's not like Judaism or Christianity or whatever is the only answer, they're all right, they're all answers. God made the world, and God made all these different types of magic, and some of them are tests of our free will, just like Lance said the last time we were all talking about this sort of thing. You can't make the right choices if you don't have the option to make the wrong choices. And most people can't deal with God's magic directly, they have to go through one of these middle steps, and sometimes it doesn't matter how you do it, it matters what your intent is --"

Joey just looked at him, waiting patiently. He didn't say anything.

JC sighed and tipped over his palm. The scar at the base of his thumb was barely visible in the low light of the nightstand lamp, but he knew Joey would see it anyway. "You're asking if Lance and I put the power into me with blood magic."

They'd been in Lance's house, in the one room he'd never let anyone see before. The floor was marble, with plain white walls and an inlaid circle of some darker stone. JC's toe rings set off soft chiming sounds as he walked. Some part of his head had been expecting the floor to be cold, but it was warm like bath-water beneath his feet.

The circle was more than large enough to fit both of them kneeling on the floor. Lance didn't say anything as he lit the candles and laid out the knife, until finally there was nothing more he could do to distract himself and he looked back at JC. JC tried a smile. It felt awkward, pasted-on.

"It's not evil," Lance said.

"I trust you." Because JC did; unquestioningly, unstintingly.

"I know you do. But you need to know. It's not evil. But I'm going to be taking something from you, and giving something to you, and you need to know that ahead of time, and you need to consent to it. Because it's the consent that makes it different. That makes it not evil."

"Lance." JC leaned over and let his hand close around Lance's wrist. "Lance, you told me already. I know. I know what it is, and I know what it's going to do, and I'm not going to say I'm not scared, because I am. But I trust you. And I agree. Consent. Whatever."

"You have to take this seriously, C." Lance was back to looking exhausted for the first time in months, for the first time since JC had stepped up to his side. JC wondered how many nights he'd been sitting up trying to figure out what they were about to do. "You have to. I can't do it if you don't understand what's involved."

JC slid his robe down over his shoulders. "You have no idea how seriously I'm taking this," he said. "And I think that you're even more scared than I am."

"Yeah, that's exactly what I'm asking," Joey said. "Because that's the only way I could possibly imagine -- possibly find -- And I didn't want to think you guys could have been involved with that, no matter how much Lance knows what he's doing."

JC nodded. His fingers were cold, and he tucked them up under his thighs. "Yeah," he said. "And you're right. We did."

Joey's shoulders tensed, quickly, and then relaxed. JC wouldn't have seen it if he hadn't been looking for it. "Okay," he said after a minute. "Okay. Was it --"

"It was hard and it took forever and it was one of the most painful things I've ever done in my entire life." JC watched the wall so he didn't have to look at Joey. "It hurt like a motherfucker and it blew some things wide open in my head that weren't meant to be there and it still aches sometimes, you know? The way your leg still hurts when the weather changes."

Lance was the one to raise the circle around them. JC could do it, and Lance said he was pretty good at it, but for something like this, it was important that it be just right. And JC couldn't feel it, couldn't sense the protections and see if they were constructed properly, layered right. Couldn't yet, he thought, and then winced. He consented, truly he did. He wanted. Not the bad kind of want, the kind where you'd do anything to get just a little more power, but the kind of want where you're going to do the job anyway and you need the tools to get it done right. Lance had once said that the only person who should have this kind of power was the kind of person who didn't want it in the first place. JC tried not to think about that too much.

"Okay," Lance said, after what felt like forever of staring off into space and whispering lightly under his breath in languages JC didn't know. He'd have to learn them. "Last chance to --"

"Do it," JC said. "I trust you. Do it."

Lance bit his lip, but nodded, and picked up the knife. It was single-edged, curved, designed to be held in one hand with a spot for the holder to place a finger against the backside of the blade to steady it. It looked old and well-cared-for. Lance pressed it to his lips, then used it to trace the solar cross against his body: forehead, groin, right shoulder, left shoulder, whispering, Ateh, malkuth, v'geburah, v'gedulah, l'olam, amen. JC could recite it along with him by now. The words comforted him. They were something easy and familiar in this web of uncertainty.

The knife was cold against his breastbone, tracing symbols he couldn't read but could feel, slinking inside of him and wrapping their way around his heart. The point of the blade was sharp, so sharp, and it parted his skin without pain. Lance had a deft touch. Only a few drops of blood rose to greet the open air, at the corners of the symbols, where the knife turned. It was over so quickly that it didn't even hurt, only itched. For a minute, JC thought that if this was as bad as it got, it wouldn't be bad at all.

And then Lance finished, took a deep breath, and held out his hand for JC's own. The itch got worse. It itched like ten thousand mosquito bites all at once, like something had crawled under his skin and was trying to get out. Lance was watching him and waiting, waiting like he'd wait forever if he had to, and for a minute JC remembered the kid who'd never quite seemed to know what to say. There was no sign of that kid now. This was Lance, the essence of Lance, looking back at him, and if it had been anyone else, JC would have bolted. If it had been anyone else, JC wouldn't have been there in the first place.

He picked up his hand and put it in both of Lance's own, and closed his eyes, because he couldn't look. He could do this, but not if he had to look. There was a quick swab of something cool and astringent over his palm, and he almost had to laugh at that, because of course Lance would remember the disinfectant first, and then the knife bit into the base of his thumb and that hurt like a motherfucker.

It hurt. It hurt so much he couldn't help but yell, even though he'd promised himself he wouldn't because he didn't want to add one bit of guilt to Lance's shoulders. Lance was talking to him, just "shh, baby, I know, hurts like a bitch, I know, I know." JC was a wimp about pain. It was one thing to push yourself until your muscles ached, but something like this, blood and skin and flesh, that was something else entirely.

His palm was slick and slippery. He forced himself to open his eyes, but he didn't look down, because he didn't want to see. Lance swabbed his own palm with the disinfectant and made an answering slice in his own hand. JC winced at how casually he slit open his own skin. Lance wiped his fingers over the blood that rose, and then traced those fingers along the lines on JC's chest. His fingers burned, or froze, or both. The edges of JC's vision swam with red that he couldn't quite see, and as Lance finished re-drawing the lines in his own blood, that red haze rose further until it covered everything.

"Selah," Lance murmured, and then wrapped his bleeding hand around JC's so the injured skin was pressed up against JC's own.

Lance was saying something else, low and carefully measured, but JC couldn't hear it. He was falling into his own heartbeat. Something exploded behind his eyes, pain perhaps, or maybe just fierce and unremitting sensation. It felt like sunlight in a desert at high noon, brutal and honest and uncontrolled. Like brushfire rushing through the dry undergrowth. Like the dam bursting and letting the river through. It started in his chest and tore through him between one breath and the next, and then it was --

"It hurt," JC repeated. He pulled his shoulders in, holding himself close, trying to forget. "It hurt so badly I've blocked it out. Like how you remember later that it hurt, but you don't remember what the hurting felt like."

Lance was saying something, but JC couldn't hear it. He was inside his own head, pulling himself tight, trying to tuck himself away from the pain. Whatever it was rushed through him, rearranging things in its wake. Picking up one piece and turning it over. Taking something and dropping it on the floor hard enough for it to shatter. Bringing something along with it and depositing it somewhere else, somewhere it was never meant to be. JC was open and raw and aching and Lance was holding on, unrelenting, unmerciful, holding on and pulling with something JC couldn't feel, except he could --

"And then, when that part of it was over, and God, it fucking lasted for a thousand fucking years, I could -- it was like waking up, it was like the first time you open your eyes when you wake up someplace new --"

JC knew his eyes were closed. Knew he was shouting, or screaming, or something, some kind of noise he couldn't hold back. He had his eyes shut and he knew he'd tilted over, slumped across Lance's lap, and Lance was holding on to him, one hand still clamped around JC's, the other arm around his shoulders. Lance was a beacon of gold blazing against nerve-endings that were inflamed, burned, torn open. So much, so much power, and the edges of the circle that contained them were dark and solid and vibrated pentatonic scales and the room beyond was washed-out and pale but he could still feel the way it held the thin white lines of old and faded spells, so much, so much, felt like forever, felt like it had been there forever, because it had been there forever, past present future everything nothing and he could feel it and he was coming apart, the negative image of an orgasm, hurt instead of bliss, burning --

Joey had pressed his shoulderblades back up against the wall, like he was trying to get away, like he was trying to retreat from whatever he heard in JC's voice. JC pulled his knees up against his chest and rested his cheek against his knees. Tried to keep his voice as neutral as he could. "It was like waking up. Because when it was over and I could feel again, I could -- I could feel."

The first thing he realized was that his throat was raw. Lance was still holding him, supporting him, keeping him from falling. Too much. Lance was too bright. He jerked backwards, scrambling against the marble of the floor, trying to find purchase against the slippery surface. The blood left a bright and vivid trail smeared behind him. Hot, cold, bright, loud, it was like he could feel it shrieking across all of his senses --

"You can't lock it down, yet, Jayce, not yet, we're not done yet, I swear to the Name, I will teach you how to shut it down when you don't need it, I know how much it is, I know, just breathe through it, look at me, look at my eyes, just in my eyes, nothing else, come on, just look at me --"

Lance's voice was steady. It was the tone he used when he was trying to calm someone down, trying to handle them, and JC hissed, because he hated to be handled. Anger knifed through him, first of a thousand other emotions he couldn't even start to name. He didn't know whether to cry or laugh or scream. Lance held up a hand, just one finger in front of his own eyes, pinning JC's eyes with his own. "Narrow it down, Jayce, come on, I know you can do it. Just here. Just look here. My eyes. Nothing else, none of the rest of it, just here."

Lance's eyes were on him, pale green capturing his attention, and that focus was almost enough to help him find himself again. The first breath savaged his chest but the second one was easier, and the third one after that. The pain ebbed slowly. As JC breathed, his chest rising and falling in time with Lance's, it retreated to a shriek and then just a moan. He breathed with it, and he breathed into it, and he didn't know how long it was, but eventually he coughed and then turned his head and shivered, once, from his shoulders down to his knees.

"God," Lance said, and breathed out roughly. He rocked his shoulders back and forth and JC could hear something pop. Could feel it in his own shoulders, a quick flare of release. "Say something. Please, God, say something."

It took him a minute before he remembered how his tongue and lips worked. "Still here," JC finally managed. "Still -- God, Lance, it hurts, you're so fucking loud --"

Lance exhaled again. "Oh, barukh atah Adonai, it worked, it didn't burn you out -- I'm sorry, Jayce, I'm so fucking sorry, I've got it turned down and hidden as much as I can. Just -- take a minute. Get used to it."

JC wondered how he was supposed to get used to anything when the whole world was an inferno. He wondered if he was ever going to be able to feel anything else ever again. It was safest just to breathe, to put his attention into the inhalation and the exhalation, nothing more. "I'm," he said after a minute. "Well. Not okay. But I'm here." He coughed again, and swallowed, and tried not to shiver again. "God. That motherfucking hurt."

Lance closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink should take, and then brought his hands up to rub them across his face. He seemed to have forgotten that his hand was still bleeding. The smear of rust across his cheek stood out in sharp contrast to his skin, which was paler than JC had ever seen it. "We're not done yet," Lance said, muffled and small against his palms, and JC fought to keep from whimpering.

JC fell silent: remembering, and trying not to. Joey shifted his weight when the silence got to be too much, and pulled the covers further up around him as though trying to block out the cold that wasn't there. "It's okay, C," he said. "It's -- you don't have to tell me. You don't. Not if you don't want to." JC could hear the lie in it, though; he could hear the way Joey wanted to ask and hated himself for even thinking it.

"It's not that," JC said, and scrubbed his hands over his face. It was Lance's gesture, just one of the hundreds of things of Lance's he carried with him. "It's -- You asked. You need to know this. You deserve to know this. I'm not going to tell you the details of how we did it. We promised we'd never tell another human being how we did it. I just don't know how to put it into words."

There were no words for it, no words for the way it felt when Lance let his hands fall again and squared his shoulders. "You can feel it now," Lance said, and JC almost laughed, because that was the biggest understatement he'd ever heard in his life, and he'd heard some good ones. Lance didn't notice. "But you can't tap into it. You can't tap the power. And if we don't tie you into it somehow, you're going to burn through everything you've got, ten times faster than you'd ever do otherwise, and I can't keep feeding you, not now. We just closed off what was letting me do that. Side effect. So if we don't introduce you to it, tie you into it, you're not going to have anything left."

JC knew all of that. Lance had explained it all, slowly and carefully, until he was sure JC understood. "Do it," he said, his voice scraping over his raw throat. "Do it, just fucking do it, don't stop to explain it again, just do it --" He didn't want to hear Lance explaining, he didn't want to have the chance to stop and realize, he didn't want to waste time with the endless asking and re-asking. They couldn't stop, not now, not half-done.

And maybe Lance knew that, maybe Lance could feel that, because he blessedly didn't ask again, not the way he usually did. He bit his lip and closed his hands around JC's wrists and reached, reached with hands, reached with not-hands, and if what they'd already done had been opening things up, this was throwing them out into the flood. If this had been what it should have felt like to have Lance filling him up with the power, have Lance storing tiny fragments of his power in JC for JC to call on it when needed, the way they had been doing -- if this had been what it should have felt like, JC never would have come back, not after the first time.

Lance was singing again, or chanting, or something, thick and heavy and steady, and the sound of it hurt JC's ears, but he clung to it like a lifeline. The flood of power rushed into him, like lemon juice or acid poured across a wound that was already nearly too much to bear. He couldn't hold it all, couldn't contain it all; he would come apart beneath it, come undone, dissolve into nothing but the power and the pain. It poured into him, peeked its fingers into every nook and cranny, saw him and measured him and pored through all of the secrets and all the things he never thought about in the middle of the night. It knew him, and it wasn't just power, there was something behind it. Watching him. Weighing him.

He didn't know where it came from, but he was whispering under his breath anyway. Oh Lord I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed. It pulled; it shoved. It sliced through all his illusions, all his polite lies to himself. It saw him, cataloged him, spread him open and laid him out. It was not cruel, nor was it kind. It simply was. Everything and nothing, alpha and omega, the first and the last, and it burned away all his shadows and left him standing out to dry in the relentless heat of that tremendous wave.

And then Lance stopped, and JC threw his head back, and that presence paused and then exploded, in his chest, in his head, in his heart. It was a river, it was a tsunami, it was being cut adrift and thrown into the pull of it. It was warm and untamed and wild and bright and terrifying. White and gold and that color that wasn't a color at all. Cacophony and discordance. Filling him, flooding him, in omnes generationes saeculi saeculorum amen and then there was nothing left of him. He was empty, bare, nothing but a vessel for that tremendous and awesome power. Hollowed; hallowed. It saw him, and it knew him, and it filled him, and it held him, and he knew it wouldn't let him go.

It should have hurt. He'd been expecting it to hurt. It didn't, not at all. It was wild and full and immense, but it wrapped him up in its arms, nudged its head into all his corners and edges, nosed around and made itself at home. It didn't feel like something new, but like something long-familiar and intimate. And after what felt like forever, after what felt like nothing more than a few short breaths, it curled around his heart and wormed its way into the pit of his belly, fitted itself against his spine, tucked itself into his blood, and -- satisfied with itself -- it slept.

"God," JC said, and even he couldn't tell if it was prayer or blasphemy or just simple observation. "God."

"Yeah," Lance said. He was pale and small and exhausted, but there was a smile on his lips, as though he'd been saving this one small secret for the very end. "I couldn't tell you. I couldn't find the words."

"I can feel you breathe." JC tipped his head back and probed at the feel of it, the way one might probe at a chipped tooth with one's tongue. It still felt raw, aching, but the initial searing pain had been soothed away by that -- well, he knew what it was, divine presence the likes of which he'd never felt in church, but he didn't really want to think about it too hard. He felt like he was too big for his skin, like all he had to do was reach out and touch the world, like he could stick his finger in an electrical socket and ride the waves to power him. "You're so bright."

Lance scrubbed a hand over his face. "Jayce, baby," he said, and it was weary and fond at once. "Look at yourself."

JC fell silent, filled once again with the remembrance of that glory. He tried to find a way to say it, tried to translate it into mundane language for Joey to understand. He couldn't. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and made a helpless gesture.

"I don't need the words," Joey said. "I don't -- I." He stopped, and then took a deep breath and started again. "C, I worry about you. About both of you. You guys are dealing with terrifying shit, and I don't know how to help you. How to stand by you. And I don't know enough to watch out for you with this, watch out for any of the warning signs that you're into something over your head. I don't know how to do it for you, and I don't know how to do it for Lance. Some of what you both do worries me. I don't want to see you get hurt, and I don't want to stand by and watch you run into problems you can't handle."

JC stared down at his hands, linked together in his lap. "Sometimes my first impulse is to say I can handle anything," he said, quietly. "That's what scares me."

There was a long minute of silence, and then Joey slid away from the wall. He moved across the bed to sit facing JC, cross-legged as well, and picked up JC's hand with both of his own. "Through the lifeline," he said, tracing the scar across JC's palm. "And the fate line."

Joey was warm and solid and there, like a tree would be there, like a house. JC was still learning how to read it, how to read all of it, but Joey had always felt that way, even before JC could actually sense it. He was tired, so tired, and the headache still throbbed behind his eyes. "Can't get out of things like this without a few scars," he said, trying for levity and mostly failing.

Joey let their linked hands fall to his lap. He didn't let go. "Was it worth it, Jayce?" he asked, with his head tilted to one side.

JC closed his eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, it was."

"Would you do it again?"

It caught in his throat. "Don't ask me that. Don't -- don't make me answer that. I can't. I did it, and it's over, and I'm not the same person anymore, and I can't answer that. I can't."

"Shh," Joey said, and his fingers pressed against JC's. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I don't want to -- I'm sorry." He closed his eyes for a minute and sighed, deeply, then slid two inches closer and wrapped his arms around JC's shoulders. JC stayed frozen for a minute, then slumped against Joey's comforting weight. "You gotta promise to let me help you. You gotta promise. You gotta let me watch you, watch out for you. Watch out for what it does to you."

"I can't fail at this. I don't know what it cost Lance to do this, but it cost him a lot more than it cost me. I know that much. And I can't ever make him regret it."

"That's bullshit." Joey pulled back and looked into JC's eyes. "C, man, that's bullshit. Listen to yourself. You sound like some kind of, I don't know, battered girlfriend or something. If you set yourself up to think like that you're going to burn out in some kind of crazy martyr glory, and that shit is not cool. You'll do what you do, and anything you do is going to be good enough, because it'll be your best, and you'll keep your head and you'll keep a hold of yourself and you will do what you need to do and you won't abuse it. I won't let you."

It sliced through JC like a scythe. He blinked at Joey a few times, and then opened his mouth. Nothing came out, so he stopped trying after a minute. Joey sighed again and rubbed his hands over JC's biceps. "I'm not yelling at you," he said. "I've just watched you turn into someone scary over the past six months or so. It's like I don't even know you anymore. I worry."

"Someone's gotta do it," JC said. "Joey, it's a shit job, but someone's gotta do it, and --"

"If you say 'it's gonna be me', I'm going to kick your ass."

He spared a smile at that. "No, that's not what I was going to say. I was going to say that if someone's gonna do it, I'd rather it be someone I trust. Like me. Like Lance." He left off saying that he didn't know how much he trusted himself, knowing Joey wouldn't understand. He trusted himself to have the dedication, but every day that passed was a reminder that he'd come to this too late, too quickly.

"What do you feel?" Joey asked, abruptly. "From all of us. What does it feel like?"

JC bit his lip. "It's -- that's not an easy question to answer. It's not just like you can put it to words. There aren't words." But that was the easy answer, and Joey deserved something more than the easy answer. "Chris is ... like needles, under the skin. No, not quite. It doesn't hurt, it's ... warm, almost warm enough to burn, but he prickles, too. Justin's like -- like a lake in the sunlight. There's a warm and comfortable part, and you can just bask in it, and then there's all this depth underneath it that nobody can ever touch. Lance is like sunlight reflected off metal. Bright, and you have to squint against it."

"And me?"

JC tipped his head to one side and rested it on Joey's shoulder. "Warm. Safe. Like a tree with strong and heavy roots."

"Huh." Joey turned that over in his head a few times, thinking. He rested his cheek against the top of JC's head. "Could be worse, I suppose."

"It's why I came to stay with you." JC stifled a yawn.

Joey picked his head up again and made the little "get off my shoulder and let's lie down flat in a real bed" twitching motion. "Come on, let's get you into bed. Long day."

"Yeah," JC said, and then held up a hand. "Hang on. Gimme a minute, let me recharge my batteries some."

Joey raised an eyebrow, but didn't question further. JC waited just long enough to make sure Joey wasn't going to say anything else, and then closed his eyes. He turned his attention outward, then inward, reaching for it, reaching for the spot deep within his belly that linked him to the world, to the power, to the power source. It came on slowly -- it's there to call on, Lance's voice whispered in his memory, but it takes concentration to address, so you should always make sure you're at full strength before you go to take care of something, because you'll have to use what you've got stored up instead of what's there for the taking unless you can maintain that touch all the time. Few people can. It's too much to deal with, in the middle of what you're doing.

Joey was still watching him when he let that endless sweet communion slip away. Before JC could say anything, Joey said, "Thank you."

JC's eyebrows drew together. "For?"

"Trusting me enough to tell me. I'm still uncomfortable about it, but at least now I know."

"You're welcome," JC said, and hoped Joey would manage to put everything out of his mind before sleep. Joey leaned over and reached to shut off the light. "You should probably leave that on," JC said, quietly.

"Yeah. I guess I should." Joey sighed, then slid under the covers. JC stretched out next to him, close enough to be there, far enough to give Joey some space. It lasted for about two seconds, and then Joey rolled over and threw one arm and one leg over JC, burying his face in JC's shoulder.

"C?" Joey's voice was muffled.

"Yeah?"

"Does it ever get easier to deal with?"

JC breathed out sharply and wormed one arm around Joey. He remembered the first dead body he'd seen, and how long it had taken him to sleep peacefully afterwards. "A little," he said. "Or maybe it just gets easier to forget."

Joey sighed and held on more tightly. "I was afraid of that."

*

Diane showed up with an overnight bag, a box of books, and pursed lips about four hours after JC called her.

"You want a cup of coffee or something?" Joey asked, scratching his stomach under his t-shirt and then dragging a hand through his hair. He hadn't bothered putting on anything other than the t-shirt and boxers he'd slept in. Everyone's relatives had long ago reached the status of family, not company.

Diane unbent long enough to give him a smile. "No, thank you, Joey. It's nice of you to ask, though. How's Phyllis?"

"She's good. I'll tell her you said hi. You sure you don't want coffee or something? Lunch? I got some of Mom's lasagna that she sent up last week."

"I was hoping to get a chance to talk to JC, actually." Diane sat down at the kitchen table and looked at them both. "Alone, if possible."

JC poured himself a cup of coffee and brought it over to the table. "Joey stays," he said, firmly. "I know your opinions on the subject, but Joey stays."

Diane shook her head slowly, and then sighed. "I'm not the enemy here, JC," she said. "This is a bad situation for everyone involved, and I know you're just doing your best. I only wish Lance had -- well, that's water under the bridge. I just don't think it's smart to involve more people in things."

"I'm involved already," Joey said. "And I involved myself, so don't go blaming Lance or JC or anyone but me. I know it's not traditional, but there's nothing about us that's traditional to begin with. I'm not going anywhere."

Diane studied them both for a long minute, and then sighed again. "You have to understand," she said. "I've been doing this for longer than you boys have been alive. And in all that time, I've never spoken about it to someone who doesn't have the magic. Jim knows, but he doesn't think about it much, and he never asks and we don't talk about it." She shook her head. "You don't understand the way we're trained not to talk about it. I don't know how Lance managed to tell you as much as he has."

"Nearly getting eaten by the minions of hell will change a friendship that way," JC said, and then smiled as pleasantly as he could when Diane's eyes flickered over to meet his. He felt guilty. He liked Lance's mom, really he did, but the way her nostrils flared every time she saw him recently, as though she could smell the blood he'd long since washed from his skin, left him edgy and uncomfortable. Something about her just set his teeth on edge, like they were destined to circle around each other warily and feel out the boundaries of their new relationship.

Joey looked over at JC -- JC could read the "okay, I see why you didn't want to call her" in Joey's eyes -- and then leaned forward. "So, what do you have for us?"

"Unfortunately," Diane said, "not a great deal. Without having been there myself, without having felt it, I'm limited in what I can do."

"I felt it," JC said. "It was wrong."

She shot him a glance underneath her eyelids. "I'm sure you did feel it, JC. And I believe you when you say it was evil, but you don't have as much experience handling these things as the rest of us do. There are some things that you can only understand once you've experienced them."

"I know what blood magic feels like," JC said, each word neat and precise.

There was a moment of silence. Nobody quite looked at anybody else. "I know you do," she said, finally. "You're always going to be sensitive to it. And that's the other reason, quite frankly, why I don't want to let you deal with it alone. Because you may not be as objective as you think you are."

"Whoa," said Joey, holding up his hands. "Okay. Look, Diane, JC called you because people are dying here, and we want to make sure it doesn't happen again. What can you tell us to help us keep this guy from going on doing whatever he's doing?"

Diane sighed. "Not much. Quite frankly, the type of magic we do isn't proactive, it's reactive. And if what JC told me on the phone is true, whoever is doing this is quite experienced in shielding. There's the chance, the small chance, that if someone were willing to expend a great deal of effort and energy for little to no chance of success, he or she might be able to tap into the feel of the region and sense if a particular large area of it were being shielded -- but that probably wouldn't be effective, both because of the size of the area and the fact that there are probably hundreds of shielded areas, for legitimate purposes. If you can manage to get me the power signature, I can get you something."

"There's nothing there," JC said. "I checked twice. Three times. Nothing. This guy, whoever he is, is damn good at covering his tracks."

"All right." Diane lifted one eyebrow in an expression that was so like Lance that JC's heart nearly stopped for a minute. He missed Lance so damn much. "I'm not going to impose on your hospitality, Joey, but if you need me for anything at all, call me. I'm going to be staying with a friend down in the Village, and we'll look into things. When I have something, I'll call you."

"Sounds good," JC said, and both of them stood as Diane got up to let herself out.

"Man," Joey said, when they were alone again. "You weren't kidding, were you? That's not the Diane I know."

JC pinched the bridge of his nose. "She doesn't trust me. She thinks I'm in this for the power, somehow. That I'm in it to get something out of it. And she's really, really mistrustful of the -- of how we managed to pull this off."

"But it was Lance's idea." Joey frowned. "Why isn't she blaming him?"

"I think she is." JC turned his mug of coffee around in his hands. "I think I'm just getting the edges of that; I think Lance is getting it a lot worse. She kind of stopped talking to him for a few weeks when all this went down in the first place."

"That's harsh."

"I think Lance is almost used to it by now," JC said. "Not with his mom, but just in general. I think he sort of expects it all to blow up in his face."

Joey sighed softly. "I think Lance is a little too fond of the suffering martyr routine," he said. "And you're kind of starting to tip over the edge to follow him. Come on, get dressed."

"What?" JC looked up, his eyebrows drawing together.

"Put on clothes. You know, clothes you can wear out of the house. We're going out. Somewhere we won't have to deal with any of this."

"Joey, we have so much stuff we have to do --"

"And number one on that list is not going nuts by thinking about it, okay? You called Diane, we gave her the info we have, we can come back later tonight and read until our eyes cross, but it's my day off and I'm damn well going to make use of it." Joey stood up. "Come on."

"Joey --"

"Jayce." Joey's eyes, when JC stopped to look closely, were haunted around the edges. "Gimme a break, okay? Please? I'm not dealing with all of this nearly as well as I might seem to be, and if I don't get out of this house and go do something else for a while I'm going to crack."

Put that way, JC couldn't say no. "All right," he said, after a minute. "Let me just go take a quick shower."

*

"Vinnie's House of Pizza and tattoo parlor, Vinnie speaking," JC said automatically as he picked up the phone.

Chris's laughter was bright even through the static. "You fucker, that was totally my line. No fair stealing."

JC grinned and leaned against the wall. "Good lines are group assets. What's up, man?"

"Not much. We're -- where the fuck are we, anyway?" Chris pulled the cell phone away from his mouth and JC could hear him conversing briefly. "There appears to be some small dispute as to whether we are in Wyoming or Wisconsin. Ron says hi."

"Wyoming and Wisconsin are nowhere near each other, Chris."

"Yeah, but they both start with a W, man. You know geography is not my best subject. So how come you didn't tell me I had to buy you a Cuisinart?"

With Chris, it was sometimes easiest to admit defeat up front. "You lost me there."

"You. Joey. Shacking up. Aren't we supposed to buy presents for that sort of shit? I mean, there's really no etiquette guide for 'one of my best friends is shacking up with one of my other best friends, who is nearly engaged to his girlfriend and has a kid, but hey, I'm a sensitive new age kind of guy so I can just roll with it.' Or if there is one, nobody's sent me my copy yet. When were you gonna tell us?"

JC just blinked. "Joey and I aren't living together. Well, I mean, I'm staying here, but we're not, like, living together living together."

Chris snorted. JC was amused to realize he could picture the expression on Chris's face perfectly. "So, tell me about this gossip column blind item I'm looking at here."

"Why don't you tell me about it?" JC pulled the curtain away from the window and peered out at the street. It looked like a pretty day, the kind where he'd like to go outside and lounge on a lawn somewhere in the sunshine to take a nap. Maybe he would. "I mean, if you're the one who actually saw it."

Chris cleared his throat. It was the familiar preface to a dramatic reading, usually applied to really bad magazine interviews or Justin's old history textbook, which Chris had pronounced fit only for burning. "'They may have said bye, bye, bye to the touring life, but our sources tell us two members of the music scene appear to be co-paying rent.' Ha, I bet they think that's clever. 'We're curious to know what the one hunk's long-term girlfriend thinks about this development.'"

JC groaned. "They must have seen me coming out of here a few days running, or something. No, no, no. We told you that you had to stop reading those things. I'm just staying here while I deal with some stuff that came up."

"Huh." Chris's voice turned muffled, as though he'd put a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. "Look out for that truck, he's going to try to merge -- yes, I know you're driving -- okay, fine, I'm shutting up now." He came back. "What kind of stuff? Are we talking, like, things with big teeth coming to eat you kind of stuff, or stupid idiots thinking they've found the secret to life kind of stuff?"

"We're talking about people keep turning up dead stuff, and I really wish you wouldn't talk about this shit in front of other people." JC sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "We called Diane. She got in yesterday morning, and she's looking over some things for me. I don't know what's going to go down, but I've got this creepy crawly feeling in the back of my head."

"Huh," Chris repeated. "Are you being careful?"

"Yes, Chris, I'm being careful. I'm also looking both ways before I cross the street, washing my hands after I use the bathroom, and eating all my vegetables." JC stopped himself, closed his eyes, and breathed. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm just getting tired of people telling me to be careful."

"Stop trying to sound like Lance on a bad day. You don't have the requisite years of experience at being a pissy bitch to be able to carry it off." JC could hear the honking of a horn and Chris's muffled swearing. "Told you -- okay, okay, shutting up. Anyway. C. I just worry about you."

"Many people do." JC sighed. "No, I know, you're just worried. It's okay. I'm fine, though. Really."

"Just don't get so caught up in trying to live Lance's life that you forget to live your own," Chris said, and hung up the phone.

*

JC was thankful for his dark sunglasses; they had been intended to make him harder to recognize, but New York September sunlight, reflected off the sidewalks, was bright. He sipped at his coffee, which was nowhere near as good as the cafe's prices should imply, and tried to avoid looking over at Diane.

"I've spoken to Lance," she said. "And a few of the people I know here. My colleague and I went back over to the scene of the latest incident, and I did what I could to lift some kind of signature from the work. I was mostly unsuccessful -- though mostly because you had cleaned up nearly everything by the time I got there."

"I couldn't leave that lying around. It would have made the building completely unlivable."

Diane made a small gesture. "No, I know. I'm not blaming you for that. It was a better cleanup job than I would have expected from someone who doesn't have as much experience as is usually necessary for things like that." JC wondered if that was supposed to have been a compliment. "We didn't -- Actually, hold on a moment."

She set her coffee down on the table with a soft click and twisted her fingers together briefly, then dipped them into the coffee and flicked them out, sky-wards. JC felt the power shift and settle around them, and then the air took on a thick and heavy sense of stillness. The foulness of the coffee was just as well, he realized, because he knew everyone's eyes, including the waiter's, would simply gloss right over them no matter how much he was trying to signal for a refill.

"Anyway," Diane said, picking her mug back up and sipping from it. "Even if I'd been there, I don't imagine there would have been any power-signature anyway. I think your guess was right, and this isn't someone who's doing it just for the power amplification. There's another purpose here. Reis and I have set up a net over most of southern Manhattan to see if we can spot any signs of someone using the power they took from that poor boy. We don't really expect to find anything, because if whoever did this was smart enough to clean the signature traces off of what he was doing, he'll be smart enough to clean the signature traces off the power he took before he uses it. But it's the first step, with a case like this."

JC drew his eyebrows together. "You can do something like that?"

Diane frowned. "Yes, you can. You didn't know? I thought you simply hadn't done it because you couldn't get enough of a trace on the first victim."

"No," JC said. "I never knew. That it was even possible."

Diane looked at him for a long minute, and then took another sip of her coffee and set it down. "Well, that's why you called me in, I suppose. Reis and I will take care of it from here. I'm sure you have other things you need to be doing."

"I can't just walk away from this one, Diane," JC said. He was baffled that she thought he would. "I need to be in on this. I need to know that I'm doing something to stop this from happening again."

"JC." Diane leaned across the table. He got the uncomfortable feeling that she was looking directly into his eyes, even behind the sunglasses. "This isn't your job. Leave it to people who have more experience."

"Of course it's my job." JC could feel his fingers curling into fists under the table, and deliberately straightened them out and spread his hands out on his thighs. "It's what I signed up for. To take care of these things while Lance was gone. It's what all of this is about. I need to help."

"No, JC, you really don't." Diane shook her head. JC was suddenly reminded of nights in Germany, when Diane had been able to look right through them and figure out the minute that they were lying to her or to Lynn. "You're very good at a limited sub-set of what we do. I won't deny that. If we were dealing with a dybbuk in the refrigerator or a grimoire that needed to be sent back to where it came from, I'd have no problems letting you handle it. But you've only been doing this for a very short time, and no matter what you and Lance did, it doesn't change the fact that you weren't born to it the way that we were. Let us handle this. There are some things that need to be done by the people who are supposed to be doing them."

"I," JC started, and then stopped. He couldn't find a way to convey the need that itched under his skin. He didn't know where it had come from, because it hadn't always been there.

The first call is going to be the worst. You're going to think you're going crazy. After that, it gets a little easier to live with it. Never easy, but easier.

"Listen to me, JC. You think I disapprove of what you and Lance did because it was drawing on the forbidden magic. That's not it. You know as well as I do that there is a time and a place to use most of those tools, and as long as they're used properly, there's nothing inherently wrong with them." Diane shook her head. "That's not it," she repeated. "Lance was born with this for a reason. He's the first person in our family to have the magic this strongly for generations. He's the first person any of us can remember having it this strongly in living memory. He deals with things on a level that the rest of us can barely conceptualize. What he gave you -- it might not be much, comparatively speaking, but what he gave you took something from him. And he had it for a reason. You get precisely as much ability as you need, for what you're supposed to do. The fact that he gave some of that to you is going to turn around and bite him someday, and I worry that it might tip the balance when it comes to something particularly nasty."

JC blinked. "He didn't -- I didn't -- he didn't tell me that."

Diane rubbed a hand across her face. "I know he didn't. I know you wouldn't have done it if you thought you were doing something that would put him in danger. At least, I know you well enough to think you wouldn't have done it. You've got a good mind for all of this, JC. You're organized and mathematical and musical enough to be able to think in the ways you have to, in order to handle this sort of thing. If you'd been born with the talent, I'd have no problems with welcoming you with open arms." She shook her head again. "But you weren't. And that's not something you can ever make up for."

JC dug his fingernails into his thighs. The spot across his chest where Lance had drawn the runes itched and burned, even though no traces of the marks remained. He wondered if Diane had ever considered the fact that maybe Lance had been given so much power precisely to give some of it to him, and then dismissed the thought as nothing more than ego. "So you're telling me I'm pretty much useless."

Diane sighed and closed her eyes. "No. That's not what I'm saying at all, and if that's how it's coming out, I'm sorry. You are helping. We can always use another pair of hands with the work. If nothing else, it's good for Lance to have someone around who can give him an occasional minor hand. I'm just saying that for situations like this, with so much at stake, it's better to leave it to someone who has experience. Let Reis and me handle it. We might not have the same raw power Lance does -- the power he gave you -- but we've both dealt with this sort of thing before, and experience counts for more than simple brute strength when dealing with a lot of these issues."

JC opened his mouth, stopped, and then closed it again.

"Go back to LA for a while, JC," Diane said softly. "Go back and do the things you need to do for your life. Go back and do the things you're leaving undone in order to sit here in New York and deal with a world you'd never even heard of a year and a half ago. If whoever is doing this can be found, Reis and I will find him."

*

Joey came home to find JC, his lips pressed together and his eyes stormy, throwing clothes into his suitcase. "Whoa," Joey said, leaning against the doorframe. "What the hell happened?"

"I had coffee with Diane this evening," JC said. He dumped two pairs of shoes on top of his pants. "She told me in no uncertain terms that it was time I went back to LA and got out of her hair."

"Oh." Joey watched for a minute in silence; JC refused to look back at him, even though he could feel Joey's eyes itching between his shoulderblades. "Okay, I'll bite. Why would she do that?"

"Because I'm interfering with the sacred duty and don't know what I'm doing and messing around with things that are out of my control and blah blah fucking blah." JC slammed the suitcase shut and zipped it up with a little more force than was absolutely necessary. A little more force than it could handle, apparently, because the edge of the zipper tore away from the fabric, and he stopped and just forced himself to breathe.

"Lemme get you a safety pin for that," Joey said quietly, and disappeared into the hallway. JC took the chance to breathe some more, reaching for the calm places inside of him. It took him longer than usual to find them.

"I hate to say it," Joey said when he returned, holding out a safety pin as though it were a peace offering, "but. I think it might be a good idea for you to go back to LA for a while. Go hang out with Dallas or something, do something that doesn't involve, you know, dead bodies in strange living rooms. Handle what you can out there, but just -- You know. Take some time for yourself."

"Not you too," JC said, and turned around. Joey folded his arms across his chest and stared back at JC, looking like he wasn't going to give an inch, and JC finally sighed and let go of some of the anger. He knew they were both right -- he wasn't experienced enough to come up against something this big, this evil, not alone -- but that knowledge conflicted with the inner voice telling him this is your fight and he knew it would be a bad idea to ignore it. "It's just not right, Joey. It feels -- wrong. Like you guys are trying to make me agree to something that's against everything I know is right." He paused and licked his lips. "There are people dying out there. I know there are people dying out there, and I know why -- or, okay, I know a little bit about why. And I can't just walk around and pretend that isn't happening while I go to parties in LA."

Joey came across the room and sat down on the bed. He reached out and took the safety pin back from JC. It was a little easier, JC thought, with Joey's eyes off of him. "Okay," Joey said after a minute, tugging lightly on the edges of the rip and pulling them together. "I see where you're coming from. But." He took a deep breath. "There's shit that needs you everywhere, right?"

JC watched him. "Yeah," he said, dubiously.

"And from what I get, you guys are really spread thin." Joey worked the ripped edges together and speared them with the pin.

"Yeah."

"So. Diane's out here, and she can take care of it. Okay, so she's pissing you off -- hell, she was pissing me off. But she's here, so she's got New York covered. And if you go back to LA, you'll be able to fix things there, where there isn't anyone right now. Is there?"

JC sighed. Trust Joey to be the logical one. "Well, there are people. But not -- yeah. Not really. Yeah."

"So." Joey tugged on the pin and, satisfied that it would hold, looked up. "If you go out there, you're really doing more good than you would be doing here, because you wouldn't be duplicating effort. Make sense?"

JC just looked at him for a minute, and then sighed again. "I hate it when you're right, you know."

"I know." Joey smiled. "Go take care of Justin while you're out there, too. He could use someone to remind him to eat."

"Yeah," JC said, and went to call a car to the airport.

*

It took JC a few days to get back into the swing of anything in LA, much less his life. His house out there was big, too big for just him and Carlos, really, especially when Carlos was out of town, but he kept it full of noise; Radiohead and Aerosmith and The Cure and Coldplay, all mixed together on the stereo system that broadcast into any room in the house.

The phone rang after he'd been holed up for nearly a week, scowling at his piano and trying to coax something, anything, out of it. He ignored it the first two times, but after the third set of rings in under ten minutes, he sighed and went to go find where he'd left it. For some reason, it was in his left shoe, in the foyer, and he picked it up just as it was about to ring through to voicemail.

Lance. "Bad news," he said, and his voice was tight.

JC sat down on the bottom step and frowned, feeling the adrenalin start to rush through him. "What? Did someone else die?"

"What -- Oh. No. No, I just got word from the program directors. There's something fucked up going on about money or something, I don't know." Lance's voice was crisp, but JC could hear the anger behind it. "I'm off the mission for October."

JC shook his head, slowly. "I thought that was just a rumor. I mean, I heard it earlier in the week, and you said it was just a rumor."

"Yeah, well. I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Trying to work a deal with them. I just wanted to let you guys know, before you hear it from the tabloids or something."

"Lance," JC said. "If you need anything --" He meant money, yeah, because what good was it to have money if you couldn't use it to help one of your best friends out, but he meant a lot more than money, and he hoped Lance knew it too. "Anything at all."

"Yeah." JC knew the dismissal in Lance's tone really covered a "thank you", but he didn't press, because he knew Lance didn't really want to hear it. "Tell me you're making some progress over there, at least."

JC shook his head. "I haven't heard back from your mom yet," he said. He'd tried to call, three days ago and again the day before, but the phone had just rung through to voicemail and he'd never gotten a call back. "I'm in LA. It's quiet out here. Too quiet, really."

Lance sighed. "Well, keep your eyes open. Let me know. You know the deal by now. I'm going to go call the other guys, okay? I'll tell Mom to call you and give you an update."

"Okay," JC said, picking at a stray thread in his jeans. There weren't any words for it. How could you say I feel like half of myself is halfway across the world, come home soon without sounding like an overdramatic teenager? "Love you. Good luck."

"Love you too," Lance said, distracted, and hung up.

JC spent another two days trying to turn out four measures he could put next to each other without them sucking, and gave up when it became clear that all he was doing was re-writing stuff he'd thrown out years ago for being crap already. He flew out to Orlando to hold Tony's hand backstage at a show; Tony talked him into coming out and making the girls in the audience scream. While he was in Orlando, he banished two succubi (being sure to tell them to say hello to Malachai, before he finished the spell, because he had to confess, he did sometimes miss the guy) and rescued a house-wight whose building was slated for demolition, moving her -- well, it, really, but JC still had to think of them as female, maybe it was the ears -- into Joey and Kelly's house. The baby could always use someone else looking after her, and house-wights were, if nothing more, excellent babysitters.

And then it was back to LA and the piano that stared at him balefully and accusingly and the parties that, really, kind of sucked a whole lot when he stopped to think about it. Alex dropped by a few times, making noises about co-writing, and all JC could tell him was "sorry, man, just isn't flowing right now".

Justin got over the being-terrified stage of pre-album-drop and started in on the wanting-to-talk-about-it-constantly stage. JC put up with it for as long as he could, and then invented excuses to hang up the phone. "Man," Justin said, after one of those nights, after some awards show or another that JC hadn't been invited to, "you need to get out of the house more often, I think you're starting to grow mold."

"Fuck you," JC said, but it wasn't really bitchy, just automatic and weary.

Diane didn't call. JC cleaned out his kitchen and found the set of shot glasses he'd thought he'd lost in Orlando, then promptly forgot where he put them. Tara dragged him out to some party up in the hills, where he amused himself by breaking the tiny glamors some of the beautiful people were wearing. He still hadn't figured out where they were coming from, but they weren't malicious, so he didn't really care. When he got bored with that, he went out for a walk, where he wound up turning down two street hookers and talking for forty-five minutes about nothing in particular with a phooka who was sitting outside a bar and smoking. He got the phooka's number. Never know when you might need one. Diane still didn't call. He began to wonder if he'd forgotten to pay his cell phone bill.

He dreamed about being on a bus that broke down just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. He wasn't even sure in the dream why he was trying to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, because he'd been there a few times and there really was no there there, but the dream went on for what felt like forever, sitting on the side of the road and waiting for the tow truck to show up. It never did. He woke up and took a shower and jerked off, but it was automatic and he didn't really pay much attention to what he was doing. Joey left long and rambling messages on JC's voicemail, asking for help with some Latin translations. Tara took him shopping so he could hold her bags. Thirteen fifteen-year-old girls tried to summon a lesser demon and got the spirit of a dead televangelist instead. JC had always suspected there was something funny going on there. He had lunch with Lynn. She smoked a lot and talked about contracts. He tried to avoid coughing.

He was at another party, some friend of Alex's, some up-and-coming indie artist nobody'd ever heard of, when something sliced through the cotton-wool like a scalpel. He dropped the drink he was holding, barely even noticing as the glass shattered on the stone floor, and pressed a hand to his temple, struggling to fight the pain. The model he'd been talking to looked at him with mild curiosity and asked if he'd like a Valium.

"No," JC said. "I. I need to go home now. I'll see you sometime. Sometime later. Okay?"

He barely remembered enough to pull the mantle of don't-notice-me around himself as he made his way out the door into the fresh air. He stumbled past a couple making out under one of the trees, then stopped. Close. It was close.

Too close; he should have felt it.

The house next door was dark and cold and silent; most of the neighborhood had either fled for the weekend or been invited to the party. JC stood outside the back door and tried to remember how to breathe. The minute before you opened the door was always the worst part.

The house had an alarm system, tastefully announced by a sticker in the side window, which JC had never really understood, because really, if you had an alarm, why would you want people to know it so they could figure out the best way to get around it -- He stopped and shook his head. Focus, dammit. He whispered a few words in Latin and rested the tips of his fingers against the door, and then stopped dead, because it didn't fucking work.

JC had been sleepwalking for two weeks and never once noticed it and he wasn't fucking sleepwalking now, his pulse racing in his throat and his breath sharp in his own ears. He fought it down as hard as he could and reached for the holy magic instead of the sorcery. If he was sent here for some reason, it had to let him in, didn't it?

"Chushah le'ezrathiy 'Adhonai teshu'athiy." He stumbled on the consonants, the way he always did. He hummed, one line laid down as foundation, another layered on top of it to build the walls. His voice cracked halfway through and it crumbled. He stopped, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and didn't think, most carefully didn't think, didn't motherfucking think of the fact that there were two hundred people a thousand feet to his left and he was standing out here alone.

One line for the foundation. Another on top of it for the walls. He kept his eyes closed so he could see it, so he didn't have to squint against the pale and washed-out light of the moon to watch the lines of the spell. He built it up around the door, the door that should not have been able to keep him out, and reached out again to strike the pads of all five fingertips against it, sharply. Open.

It clicked open.

The thing to do when you're terrified is to walk forward, because if you don't, you never will, Lance said in his ear, in his memory. JC threw up another layer of protections around himself, knowing they were sloppy, not caring, and stepped inside. There was a red light flashing on the wall, security system trying to decide if it detected an intruder or not, and JC threw a tendril of power at it before he even really knew what he was doing. It flashed again, once, and then sputtered to a weak halt.

Quiet in here. Too quiet, JC caught himself thinking, and then stopped himself, because he'd seen those movies and he knew what it meant when someone said that. It pulled him up the stairs, and every step felt like he was struggling against someone else's don't-notice-me. He stopped on the sixth stair and caught his breath again. Get a grip. It's just a house. It's just --

Something brushed past his feet, and he nearly fell against the wall. A pair of golden eyes looked up at him, and he huffed out the breath he'd drawn. A cat. Just a cat, glaring up at him, wondering what he was doing there. He was beginning to wonder the same himself. But it was here, whatever had pulled him, whatever had yanked him. It was here.

And then he walked up the stairs, and it all started to fall into place.

She was -- had been -- in her late forties, in the way everyone in LA in their late forties looked like they were really thirty-one, and she was lying on her back across the marble floor of her workroom in a pool of her own blood. The protections of her workroom had been shattered, gutted, left in a thousand pieces on the floor. JC noticed, without really noticing, that the shelves of her workroom had been full of oils and herbs, which had been pulled down and broken across the floor. The protections he'd had to work through in order to get into the house had been her own, and that scared him even more, because they'd been full-strength and whatever had done this, whoever had done this, had somehow walked through them without breaking them at all. Or had broken them, and put them back up again with her own power-signature, he thought. Which was, in a way, even worse.

The lines, the diagrams, of the spell drawn in her blood on the floor were almost starting to be familiar now. JC reached for the notebook in his back pocket and then stopped, because he didn't have it; he'd left it at home, because nothing was fucking happening. He fixed them in his mind the best he could, cursing himself the entire way, and knelt down at her side to try and get the sense of her.

Then he nearly fainted, because her eyes opened and stared directly at him, full and glazed with pain. "Shit," he said, "shit, shit," and dropped his fingers to the curve of her throat to search for the pulse. He found it, weak and thready but still there, dammit, still there. Looking closer, he could see that her wounds were not as serious as the others' had been; they were long and many, but shallow, as though whoever had done this had been toying with her. "Are you -- can you hear me?"

JC fumbled for his cell phone with one hand, intending to dial 911 and the hell with it, he could fucking make their computers forget he'd ever called once the ambulance got there and someone had taken care of her. "Hold on," he said to her, reaching for the well of power within him, reaching out with the healing magic Lance had insisted he learn first and really, he was awfully fucking glad of it, reaching to pour the power into her and convince her body it wanted to heal itself --

And stopped.

She wasn't there.

She was right underneath his hand. He could feel her, he could feel her skin and the slippery and unctuous gloss of her blood, he could see her eyes and they were open and she was breathing, just a little but she was breathing. And she wasn't there. The place where she'd been, her consciousness, her power, her soul, was nothing but a ragged hole, a gaping black maw that had been and now was not.

JC fought back the nausea and cast about himself, looking for some sign of it, some sign of where she'd gone. He'd seen cases where someone had been so traumatized, so hurt, that they'd retreated into themselves and not come out again. This wasn't one of them. She was just gone, as if she'd never been there; her chest rose, her chest fell, and there was nothing there to indicate where she'd once been or had gone.

--to walk forward, Lance whispered, and JC held his breath and sang ateh Malkuth and dove after.

Every time Lance had taken JC to one of the other planes it had looked different, like someone had come through and redecorated, re-arranged, since the last time he'd been there. This time it was an exact replica of the room he was in, right down to the cool chill of the marble beneath his knees, only the shelves were repaired and the blood wasn't there. She was stretched out beneath his fingers still, except her body -- astral-body, dream-body -- was faded and insubstantial. JC slid his hands that were not hands down to her chest, intending to try and coax some hint, some clue out of her essence of self, and then his hand slipped and slid into the hole that shot through her chest, here, in this world.

The outline of her body seemed to skip half a frame, like a movie that was out of joint, and then crumbled to dust, like it had been nothing more than a desiccated shell waiting for the impetus to blow away. The jolt of it shocked him back to his own body, back into the physical world, where he could feel the soft throb of her pulse under his fingers still, and he closed his eyes and took another breath and tried to keep from screaming.

JC's training took over, and thank all the names of the Holiest of Holies that it did, because he really was half an inch away from a complete and total nervous fucking breakdown, but he had it under control and by God that control would not slip. He stood up, praying that his knees would hold him, and shoved his cell phone back in his pocket, because he wouldn't need it now. Holding his hands out, palms tipped upwards, he sang the line of it and waited.

It came trickling slowly into him, piece by piece, fraction by fraction, struggling through her wards and her protections. Each little fragment of power that had ever been used in this house, in this workroom. He got the sense of her from it, far too late, far too late to do any good. The friend -- lover? male, less powerful than she, warm and affectionate and solid -- who lent her aid when it was needed. The collected hundreds of guests, of visitors, who had come in and out since she had moved in, leaving little traces of themselves as they went. The cat, sitting just outside the door now, watching him and wondering what he was doing, wondering what was wrong. He pulled them all to him, eyes shut, flipping through each with clumsy and awkward "fingers", touching each one and identifying it until he knew, and then he stopped, because none of them had been the one to do this.

JC dropped his arms again, and pulled his cell phone back out, and when it rang through to voicemail again he started swearing and didn't stop until he heard the beep. "Your brilliant fucking idea to send me back to fucking LA didn't fucking work," he said, and he knew he should watch his mouth, but he could feel the anger threatening to overwhelm him. "I've got another dead woman here, except she's not dead. Something has, however, pulled her soul right out of her, along with every scrap of power or talent she might have ever fucking had, and the runes are in the same damn handwriting, and there's sweet fuck-all in terms of power signature. Is that enough to make you fucking call me back this time?"

He dropped the cell phone back in his pocket, bent down to kneel beside the poor woman again, and ran his hands through her hair, collecting the few strands that came loose and tucking them into his wallet, since he didn't have his backpack with him, where there would have been Ziploc baggies. And a lot of other things, all of which would have been useful, but no point thinking of that now. No salt, no holy water, no nothing, but JC was angry enough that it didn't really matter. He bent over and rubbed his palm over one of the lines of runes, feeling it break, feeling the dark magic shatter -- and I hadn't even noticed it until right then, he realized, and that means he's still got the wards up, and I'll fucking worry about that when I get the hell out of here -- and let the power explode from his hands, sharp white fire burning it all away.

Qumah'Adonai qaddemah phanayv hakhriy'ehu pallethah naphshiy merasha'charbekha mimthiym yadhekha Adonai mimthiym mecheledh chelqambachayyiym utsephiynkha temalle' bhithnam yisbe'u bhaniymvehinniychu yithram le'oleleyhem 'aniy betsedheq 'echezeh phaneykha'esbe'ah bhehaqiyts temunathekha.

The words fell from his tongue without the usual hesitation. One of the vials of oil on the floor behind him, one that had miraculously survived the destruction, fragmented from the sheer amount of it all. JC ignored it, ignored everything but the need to get rid of it, clean away the crawling fetid evil that left no clues, no way of tracing it or tracking it. Get rid of the clues that would point the police at him, too, because the last thing he needed was some smartass forensics department lifting his prints or tracking his shoes. When he was done, he felt hollow, like he'd run a marathon on no sleep and without having eaten anything in three days, and he closed his eyes and tried to remember how to breathe.

And then, before he left to go back to his place and use those bits of the woman's hair to try and forge some connection with her, try to find out where she'd gone -- gone, or been taken -- he knelt beside her again, gathered the last little reserve he'd saved for this very purpose, let the magic flow from his fingertips, and reached in and stopped the body's heart.

*

The adrenaline wore off halfway across town, and JC had to pull over and just shake for a minute. Cars whooshed by him on Sunset, and he wondered whether any of them had any idea what was going on. He could feel himself starting to go into shock, because he'd used far more power than he should have, far too quickly, without having been ready for it. The headache started right behind his eyes and went all the way down.

Gatorade was useful for more than just post-show re-hydration, though, and at Lance's advice, JC had thrown a few bottles into the backseat of his car and let them rattle around. He pulled one out now, cracked it open, and sipped from it, not wanting to send his system into overload. He'd figured out pretty quickly that Lance had been right about the refined sugar thing, too, so he pulled out the bag of gummi bears he kept in the glove compartment. He breathed from his diaphragm and bit the feet off the gummi bears first and tried to shut his brain up for a while. It didn't work all that well.

By the time he got home he was feeling better, more or less, and he checked his answering machine automatically even though anyone who knew him knew his cell phone was a much better way to get in touch. No messages. Lance had a workroom in his house, but JC didn't yet, even though he'd been idly planning to add one. He'd done some work to one of the spare bedrooms, though, to make it suit, and it was there that he headed, before he'd done anything more than kick off his shoes and grab a few necessities.

Lance had said, once, that in a lot of cases the "ritual" part of "ritual mage" was really more to suit the magician than the magic. Unless you're dealing with something from another plane, in which case it's safest to follow all the rules, because with that we really don't know what's necessary and what's just been tacked on over the years. Other than that, if it works, just do it, and don't worry about whether or not it's traditional. JC could remember the way Lance had been distracted, irritated, flipping through his books and his papers, looking for something. That had been right at the very beginning. And that's going to make the traditionalists hate you even more if they ever find out I'm telling you this, because to some of them it's more important that something look right than work right. But if it works for you, use it.

JC thought he understood how that could happen. Someone comes up with something and it's the way they want to do it -- and some of the people he'd met had been the type to dot every i and cross every t -- and when it gets passed down, nobody tries to separate out what's necessary from what's simply a matter of preference. Lance didn't hold with most of it. JC had seen him boil a twenty-minute incantation down into "point, gesture, mumble", and it worked. JC hadn't been able to do that, not at first, not when he couldn't sense any of it and had to rely on the rote repetition to make sure he was doing anything, much less something right. Something had changed after That Night, though -- he always thought of it that way, in capital letters -- and he'd started to realize that Lance had been right. Once you could sense it, the ritual almost started to be a hindrance.

He loved it nonetheless, when he had the time and leisure to do it. Working magic off-the-cuff, the way Lance tended to do, burned power at a far greater rate than if things had been set up properly. That was what the ritual had been designed to do, originally. JC's training had been light on the ritual theory and heavy on the practical application, but there'd been enough of the former for him to understand that much. Lance said he himself didn't need to worry about it, that he had enough power to be able to burn a fraction of it on doing things fast instead of traditionally, but JC sometimes wondered if that attitude was precisely why Lance always seemed to be more tired than he should be.

Ritual had another helpful side-effect, too. Walking through it, in the proper order, in the proper steps, calmed him. JC could feel the unease in the back of his mind settling as he walked the circle, called the protections, laid out the lines of the Sephirotic Tree and blessed and consecrated the space for the hundredth time. It was familiar; doing it put him in the right mindspace.

Once he'd satisfied himself that the room was as safe as he could make it -- which was pretty damn safe; wards were one of the things that just made sense to him -- he sat down on the cushion on the floor, his one concession to comfort over tradition, and closed his eyes. Reach out, then in, blessing and peace all at once, and he could feel the power filling him back up. He tended to think of it like the life bar on one of Chris or Justin's video games. He'd told Lance that, once, and Lance had laughed and said he could have come up with worse analogies.

It took him longer than usual to feel like he was at full strength again -- he'd pushed it down to the absolute line, far enough that if Lance had been there he would have gotten a lecture about always keeping something in reserve, but it had been necessary -- but once he was there, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes. The room had that peculiar shimmer around the edges that indicated that by warding and protecting it, he'd managed to drag the space at least slightly out-of-phase with the rest of the world, into that space somewhere between Yezirah and Beriyah.

JC took a moment just to breathe, once he'd filled himself with that pure clean power again. Out of everything involved with this shit, this was the part that made it bearable, the moment when he touched the well of something so far beyond his knowing that he had no words to even describe it. If that was God -- and Lance was curiously silent on that topic -- JC finally understood the mystic's lifestyle.

But he couldn't linger; he knew that much. He unfolded his legs from underneath him and pulled out the strands of hair he'd taken from the victim. He'd put a low table in the middle of the circle, just somewhere he could leave things he was working with, and he spread them out over the table, smoothing them with his fingertips. "Okay," he said, "talk to me, and let's see if we can figure out who did this to you. So I can track him down and make sure he gets what's coming to him."

The hair didn't answer him, but he wasn't expecting it to. He stroked his fingers over it, reached inside of himself for that still small knowing, and threw himself after the thread of connection.

It always disoriented him to go looking like this, but it had never been this bad before. Lance had been the one to take him, before, the one to pull him along and bring him safely through. Freed of that anchor, it was as though he was buffeted by a thousand winds, whisked and pulled and torn from one thread to another. He clung to the sense of the woman (Katrina, it whispered to him, not the name she was born with, but the name by which she was known to us) and held onto his goal with the singularity of determination.

You're going to be better at this than I am, someday, Lance had told him once. You've got the patience for it that I don't. JC didn't feel very patient, but he held onto his sense of himself with both hands and sorted through all the impressions as best he could. Wrecked room, dead body, his own personal signature threading into the picture and he breathed through it all, because the connection through the hair was the connection to the body, not the soul. He'd thought it would have been, but he hadn't been sure. He'd never seen a case where body and soul weren't in the same place to begin with.

Show me, he said to that sense of her, show me where she has gone, so I can find who has done this and start setting things right. Those senses he could not explain, could not quantify, shifted and stuttered and then swirled, beginning to follow. Beginning to trace the steps across the link from body to soul, a link that had been severed but the ghost of which still remained.

JC held on with metaphorical fingernails, clung to the threads of it, clung to his own self and that connection with the undefined ineffable radiant presence that always watched over his shoulder when he was doing things like this, watched over him to keep him safe. He was being tossed on the waves, blown through the storm, and then it all settled and --

The book was thick and heavy, bound with some dark hide, the edges of the pages rough-cut and ragged. The man placed it back on the shelf, running his hand over the spine the way one might touch the skin of a lover, and turned away. The room was well-lit, comfortable, the sort of place one might go to enjoy an after-dinner cigar and glass of brandy, turning pages in the books that lined the shelves and contemplating the secrets held within.

He crossed the room and sank back down in the chair, then stopped, as though he sensed something. He picked up his head and surveyed the room, slowly, looking for the source of the disturbance, and then he seemed to know. His eyes widened slightly. JC could not hear him as he spoke through the rushing sound in his own ears, but the man's lips moved, and that was enough.

You.

He lifted one hand and the silver rings on each finger glinted in the firelight, as he waved it, and JC found himself back in his own body, in his own workroom, with what felt like someone driving a rail-spike through his temples, curled up on the floor and trying not to retch. He breathed, holding on, holding on, and it took a long minute before he could think anything but fuck.

He hadn't been able to get a good enough grasp on the power signature, but he'd felt it. Sensed it, dimly, wrapped around the man, wrapped around the room. Thick and dark and fetid and yet oh, so familiar, because he knew that magic, he knew it. It was their magic. It was the magic Lance burned with, the magic that slept underneath his own skin. It was the true magic, the holy magic, the magic that came from the power of that Power: warped, twisted, perverted, re-fashioned and made to serve human purpose, not divine.

Whoever was doing this was one of them.

JC dropped the cell phone three times before he managed to hit memory two. It rang through to voicemail and he listened to Lance's voice explaining that he was probably in training, leave a message. His voice was shaky in his own ears. "Lance," he managed to get out, "it's JC, call me the second you get this message," and hung up.

Oh God, he thought, and he couldn't tell if it was prayer or despair. Oh God oh God--

I'm in over my head. Help me. Please, help me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay. Go on."

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

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

"Yeah. Sorcery, not holy magic."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Joey, I --"

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You need to be careful --"

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Something fell to the floor behind him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Will do," JC said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a deal," Joey said.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you have a pen and paper?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reis snorted. Diane leaned forward. "How?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's --" Diane started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think, dammit. Focus.

Something in the back of his head was screaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world went black.

*

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

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

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

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

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

Focus. Focus, dammit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shit.

The stakes suddenly seemed a hell of a lot higher.

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

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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