Mark Teppo - Lightbreaker

I only wanted one of them anyway.

I paused at the sidewalk and looked back. Pender, true to his word, was still Watching. I glanced across the street before I turned toward downtown and the waterfront.

Pender wasn't the only observer. The detective, the man whom Doug had invaded and used to shoot me, was watching too. He was sitting in the car parked across the street.

Most of the rain had blown over the Puget Sound and the city during my incarceration. As I stood on the upper deck of the west-bound ferry, the wind pushing the storm east was a persistent pressure on my face. It smelled clean; the pollution in the air had been dampened down by the rain. I could smell wood smoke and pine trees-rural civilization on the edge of the wild.

The ferry staterooms were too small for me right now, a claustrophobic reaction to the time spent in the tiny room at the police station. I needed to smell the forest and the fresh air; I needed to have my face scoured by the wind. Like soap and water, water and soap. While my father had wanted to cleanse the natural world from his skin, I sought its touch. I needed its blessing.

I had only been in custody for six hours. A sign in itself of Pender's position within the SPD. The man could get things done. Of course, I didn't expect any less of a Watcher in the field.

Eventually, the detective joined me on the upper deck. On my walk down to the ferry terminal, I had tried to make it easy for him to follow me. I didn't want to get all the way out to Bainbridge Island, and discover he hadn't been able to follow my trail.

He was several inches taller than me and a good decade older, with a face permanently creased from exposure to the Seattle weather. His hair was short, and there were patches of gray at his temples, streaks that descended into his wide sideburns. While he still seemed like nothing more than an aged bull awkwardly stuffed into a suit, up close I could read a deep weariness-an infection that ran down into the marrow of his bones.

His overcoat was thick and warm, clearly the one piece of clothing he had put some thought into. Underneath, his suit coat was too light for the season, and his tie was too garish to be anything but a designer knockoff. Solid shoes though. A working man who kept track of the days and weeks. Checkmarks on a calendar, months blacked out as they vanished into history. The steady march toward retirement.

In complete disregard of the ban against smoking in public places, he slipped a cigarette into his mouth and cupped one large hand around the end. I looked at his knuckles as he worked the lighter-an angrier and more misshapen tale told in their knotted surfaces than the story pounded into my hands. Boxer, maybe; football, probably. Given his size, my guess was defensive lineman. Just during college and then he gave it up to chase felons and murderers.

He sucked deeply on the cigarette, making sure the tobacco caught. A blur of smoke flickered out of his mouth and vanished, whisked past his collar by the wind. "Detective John Nicols," he said, offering me his hard hand.

I took it. "Markham."

He smiled. "Yeah, with a first name like yours, I'd stick with just the family name too."

"It's a perfectly good given name," I said. "I even let my friends use it."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves." He sucked in his cheeks, highlighting the shape of his skull. There were dark circles under his eyes, which had been bright green once but the job- no, something else -had dulled the color. Now, though, they twitched and moved like he was tracking shadows and ghosts. Like he was Seeing. "I want to ask you some questions."

"Didn't Pender tell you?"

"Pender. ." He made a face like he had just swallowed a bony piece of fish. "The lieutenant is. . efficient. He knows the right people, and he knows how to get them to move quickly." His cigarette found his mouth, and his words slipped out around the obstruction. "I'm on administrative leave-with pay-for two weeks. My therapist has already been instructed to double my sessions, and she's already offered to write me a prescription for anti-depressants.

"Patrolman Murphy-the kid you jumped-is off the streets. Got himself a promotion."

"Really?"

"No one is talking about what happened to his fingers. Including Murphy." Nicols removed his cigarette, but didn't look at me. "Way I remember it, you did more than crush his gun, but you wouldn't know it looking at the kid.

"He's smart. This is his lucky break, regardless of what really happened. He's not going to rock the boat. He's going to just forget it, along with everyone else, just like Pender wants. The lieutenant has. ." He weighed how much more he wanted to say, how much more he wanted to confide in me. An uncomfortable position for a man like him. He grimaced, deciding I probably already knew more than he did, even though I was the outsider. "Murphy's been hooked. He doesn't realize it yet, does he? Pender isn't one to waste any opportunity that can be leveraged. I've never had any reason to run into the guy-I knew his name, his reputation for being a hard-ass-but it didn't take him long to twist everything to. ."

"His advantage," I finished.

"Yeah."

"It's a carefully cultivated skill," I said.

I had broken bones in Murphy's hand. The patrolman had, whether Pender allowed him to remember it or not, accepted a gift from a Watcher by letting Pender heal his hand-that was most certainly what had been done to sanitize the scene. Such gifts were never free-these were the sorts of favors that would be called due in the receiver's lifetime. Having been exposed to magick, the young officer would be primed to deal with it again. Such agents were useful. But he didn't know what awaited him in this new world, and I doubted Pender planned on telling him. Murphy had been asked to take on a little faith.

"You're apparently too old to be useful," I said . Or too obstinate. "You get the 'let's medicate the lunatic' option."

"Yeah, lucky me."

"Are you seeing things, John?" I asked. Not Detective. John . Two men sharing things they have in common, sharing secrets . Building a bond.

Some of the techniques the Watchers taught their young were worth remembering. Hell, Nicols probably knew a few of them himself. Probably had been shown them by his mentor when he came on the force. Thus was ever the way secret knowledge passed from generation to generation.

He looked at me, and then his gaze skipped away as if I were too shiny to look at for very long. "At first," he said, "it was just a weird glitter, like being outside on a sunny day without sunglasses. Everything seemed shinier than it should be. But it's getting worse. Now people are starting to glow. From their eyes."

The windows to the soul. Trite, but true: the eyes were the most light-sensitive route to the soul. You could hide beneath the flesh, but it was more difficult to hood the eyes. "What else?" I asked. Could he see the flow?

He gestured toward the front of the boat. "I see a big stripe in the water. It runs right beneath the boat. Like we're following it."

Doug's possession had been brutal enough that Nicols' vision had been torn wide open, a huge rift in the protective layer over his psyche. He was Seeing too much and he couldn't turn it off. "It's called a ley line. Spelled L-E-Y. There are natural ones-geomantic lines formed by the magnetic fields of the planet-and there are the ones we make by traveling over the same route again and again."

"So I'm seeing some sort of energy pattern?"

"More of a grid. A framework of flow. We're all part of it. Our first roads followed the natural lines. As we became more forceful with our own desires, we strayed from the leys, and started creating our own tracks. Over time, the constant passage of human energy along a new path causes a shift in the Earth's geomantic fields. The ley moves to correspond to the new route. You can't escape entropy, Detective. All systems move to a state of least resistance."