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“Where are you now?”

“Crossing onto Drake. Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“This woman just walked by me, and she was eating a churro. Do you have any idea how much I want a churro right now? Where did she get it?”

“Tess, focus. What happened between you and your mother?”

“We had a fight.”

“Did it involve Lucian?”

“No. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

I could practically feel him rolling his eyes. “Do I have to remind you that you just got your ass kicked by a necromancer? Now you’re about to conduct an illegal search of another necromancer’s apartment.”

“It’s not a search. If he asks, I’ll just say I stopped by to water his plants.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Yes. I’m a procrastinator. I have to go.”

“Please don’t do anything stupid.”

“Like what? I’ve been here before. Worst-case scenario is that I knock over one of his scented candles.”

“If you see something that looks weird—don’t touch it.”

“Thanks. Okay, I’m going in.”

“Tess—”

“And can you pick up some milk and sandwich bags on your way home? And cream cheese, but not the low-fat kind. I want all the fat. Thank you!”

I hung up before he could protest.

I didn’t really have an explanation for my behavior. I was exhausted. I knew that Lucian was lying to me, and I needed to find the smallest scrap of something that would corroborate my suspicions.

Or maybe I wanted to find something that would completely exonerate him.

No. I wanted to be right. Even if it meant that Lucian was screwing me over, I wanted to trust my gut.

A lot of things went through my head during the drive over there. I thought about all the times I’d screwed up as an OSI. All the times I’d felt incompetent, weak, or just plain stupid. Every horrible thing that Marcus Tremblay had ever said to me (before I stabbed him, which wasn’t as satisfying as it sounds).

But mostly, I thought about magic itself, and how I still didn’t understand it. Where did it live? Was it breathing somewhere inside me? Was it hidden in some node of my central nervous system, impossible to detect? And if so, did it exist as a beneficent cluster of cells, or was it more like a cancer?

I’d never felt powerful. I’d always feared that I was getting by on a mixture of charm and tenacity.

Nobody had ever described me as an impressive or fearful mage before. I was nearly an OSI-3, but when (or if) I made that rank, it wouldn’t be because I was some kind of prodigy. Hell, I threw everything I had at that necromancer in the park, and it barely fazed him. A vampire had to bail me out. I wasn’t going to win any contests for firepower, and I couldn’t read minds.

But according to my mother, none of that was true. I had power. So much power that two gifted mages had to put a block on it, so that I wouldn’t burn like a crazy flare for my father to see. I’d been muzzled.

I had so many questions for her. Was the block gone now? Would I catch up to the other superstars, or would I always be in the remedial class? Was I going to go through some kind of second magical puberty? At twentysix, the prospect seemed both terrifying and slightly attractive.

Maybe that was why I’d recognized the latent power so early in Mia. Her magic had been suppressed as well, in order to transform her into a kind of weapon. Maybe we were both bullets in the same gun.

I crossed Drake and approached Lucian’s apartment. I could hear jazz and laughter coming from Aqua, the upscale restaurant on the corner that celebrities favored when they were filming in Vancouver. Neon made the asphalt look gold, like an ominous version of the Yellow Brick Road. Suddenly, I wished that I could sync up my whole life to Dark Side of the Moon. The last time I’d tried it, I’d been in no real condition to operate a turntable. But maybe it would work now. It must have worked for someone, right?

The key fit perfectly. I exhaled. Now or never.

I opened the door, and cool air washed over me. My boots clicked against the polished concrete floor. I could smell detergent, and something else. Maybe a hint of bachelor suppers past. The man loved Thai food.

I walked upstairs to his loft bedroom. The bed was made neatly. It didn’t look as if it had been slept in for a few days, but Lucian was also very adept at tucking in hospital corners. For all I knew, he’d made it just a few hours ago. I wanted to think that I’d be able to sense his presence, but it didn’t work quite so easily. Necroid materia didn’t resonate on the same frequency as the elemental materias that mages worked with. Trying to detect it was like fiddling with an unfamiliar radio in the hopes of landing on a coherent station.

All I felt was anxiety. If Lucian had a detectable essence, I couldn’t distinguish it from the ambient sounds and smells of the apartment.

I opened up the top drawer in his dresser. Socks in various shades. Assorted underwear, including the plaid boxers that he’d worn a year ago when we first had sex. I smiled when I saw them.

What was I looking for? I didn’t really know. But all signs pointed to the fact that he was hiding something from me. Duessa hadn’t called him out specifically, but she didn’t trust the necromancers, and neither did I. Ordeño had been one of their own, and it was in their best interest to protect his secrets. Lucian may have been ostensibly cooperating with our investigation, but he was also holding something back. If he had something to hide, it was going to be here.

I opened every drawer. No false bottoms. No secret compartments. But he did have several pairs of neatly folded jeans, eight black collared shirts, and a collection of cuff links that I’d never seen before.

I took out my athame. The concrete floors were dampening my senses, but I could still detect a few pockets of air and liquid materia. I remembered the stairs to the loft, which he’d only recently built.

They were made of clean, unvarnished pine, smooth to the touch. I drew energy from the wood and let it flow into the athame. The handle warmed to my touch.

I flicked the athame, and a cone of infrared light shone from its tip. Not as powerful as an IR camera with treated film, but it could still penetrate through most substrates. I scanned the walls and floor, going over every inch. Nothing but a few scuff marks and one badly installed piece of dry-wall.

The bed looked so comfortable. I was suddenly aware of my aching muscles and latent headache, which was about to blossom. I thought about the Vicodin in my purse. It would be so nice to pop a few pills and fall asleep in Lucian’s bed. Maybe I’d wake up next to him in the morning, and he wouldn’t even ask how I got there. He’d just kiss me and ask what I wanted for breakfast.

Right. That always happened.

I went downstairs. The coffee table had a few scattered magazines— Discovery, Popular Mechanics, and the Walrus . The couch was tidy, and the remote control had been placed neatly on one arm.

Ours was usually buried underneath the cushions, and you had to practically go spelunking just to find it every night.

I walked down the hallway. Some people hid things in their bathroom, but Lucian didn’t strike me as the type. Besides, I’d looked through his medicine cabinet the last time I was here, and he didn’t even have so much as an aspirin bottle. Just Q-tips, nail clippers, and rubbing alcohol.

His laptop was humming quietly in the office. As I crossed the threshold of the doorway, I felt the first pang of real guilt. Up until this moment, I could have pretended that I was just a neurotic girlfriend. Now I was actually invading his workplace. There were locked filing cabinets in here, and removable hard drives, and all sorts of digital caches of treasure. Things meant for his eyes only.

The desk had an accordion file on it. I looked through it briefly, but didn’t find anything but tax receipts and old bank statements. I didn’t look at the balance. But for some reason, I was surprised that he used a credit union.

Twenty minutes later, I found myself staring at the two locked filing cabinets. I didn’t sense any materia coming from them. If I really wanted to, I could probably pick the locks with a bobby pin.

Christ.

What was happening to me?

“This is stupid,” I said. “If he’s hiding something, you’re not going to find it. The guy spends half of his time in a hidden city.”

I wasn’t about to get a bus ticket to Trinovantum. Nobody in the CORE knew where it was, or how to get there. All we understood was that, sometimes, stillborn infants were brought to the hidden city by nurses who weren’t what they seemed. The babies were swaddled and cared for and—somehow—brought back to life. Or brought into unlife. We didn’t understand how it worked. Lucian had told me only bits and pieces about his past, and when I pushed for more information, he just shut down.

I flicked on the light switch. I was going to leave him a nice note: Miss you, watered your plants, hope all is well, besos.

That was when I noticed the picture for the first time.

It was hanging above the desk. I didn’t remember seeing it before, but I’d never really spent a lot of time in Lucian’s office. Maybe it had been there all along. Or maybe he’d just put it up recently. It was definitely a Picasso. The lines and shadows were all askew, but the room in the painting seemed eerily familiar. I stared at it. There was what looked like a figure standing in an open doorway. Another figure was kneeling, and above its head was a swirl of white, like a flashbulb.

It wasn’t the figures themselves, but rather their positioning, that made me realize what I was looking at. Las Meninas.

Only, it wasn’t. It was Picasso’s version of Las Meninas . The Infanta Margarita was a perplexity of geometric shapes, her head a large octagon, her torso a narrow rectangle. Her dress was still spread out on the floor, but now it looked more like a fat scalene triangle. The man standing in the open doorway resembled a tall lamp, or possibly a distended umbrella. Velázquez the painter was a cluster of forms draped loosely over the Cross of Santiago, which in Picasso’s version resembled a coa-track with body parts hanging from it. Vaguely threatening triangles and half shapes floated around Margarita’s head in shades of vivid blue, yellow, and red.

Come to think if it, I’d read somewhere Picasso had made abstract copies of Las Meninas. He’d been nearly obsessed with the original.

But why did Lucian have a copy of this particular painting? It seemed like too much of a coincidence. Two necromancers. Two versions of the same painting. And Ordeño had been Lucian’s mentor.

What knowledge had he passed on to his pupil? Was Lucian working to ensure that his secrets would remain hidden?

It made sense. Necromancers were marginalized, misunderstood, cryptic. They kept to themselves, protected one another. But Lucian’s sense of loyalty was now squarely in the way of my investigation.

I used my cell to snap a picture of the Picasso. Then I turned the light off and returned to the living room. Everything looked exactly as it had when I’d first opened the door. I closed my eyes, ground-ed myself, and concentrated.

The earth materia responded to me, even from beneath the concrete floor. I thought about white things: snow; the fur on the underbelly of my childhood cat, whom I’d named Opal for reasons known only to my six-year-old self; clean foolscap; freshly washed sheets; primed walls; and polished bone. It was an old trick that Meredith Silver had taught me for erasing one’s presence.

The materia settled itself into a neutral field, which then sank into the walls and floor. It was like metaphysical air freshener. Unless Lucian could smell me, he’d probably sense nothing untoward when he returned home.

I closed and locked the door. I was already dialing as I crossed the street.

“Hey. I’m fine. What can you tell me about Picasso?”

12

My father the demon was painting me.

Like Velázquez, he wore a black surcoat, but instead of the Cross of Santiago it was embroidered with three drops of blood. As I watched them, the drops danced, forming first a triangle and then a slowly spinning circle. Sometimes the blood looked real, and sometimes it was just thread.

He was tall. Maybe six-two or six-three even. His hands and face were nearly translucent, the same color as glazed porcelain. Veins flared underneath the surface of his flesh, and the blood that coursed through them was multicolored. Looking at them reminded me of the abalone that coated the inside of shells. Was his blood really different colors, or was it just a trick of the light streaming through the windows?

“Tess. You should really hold still. He can’t capture you otherwise.”

I turned at the sound of the familiar voice. Mia was standing to my right, wearing a voluminous yellow gown and holding a silver chalice. As I stared at her dress, the flowers on it moved before my eyes. I thought of the glasses that our data technician, Esther, always wore, with their shifting reflections. The flowers bloomed and then shriveled as I watched them, crumbling to red and yellow powder.

Two young girls knelt beside Mia, fussing with her dress and shoes. The girl on her right was Eve, my childhood best friend, who’d perished in a fire. Seeing her again was like a blow to the stomach.

Years ago, she’d run away from me, terrified when I channeled a bit of fire materia to make my hands glow. She was supposed to think it was pretty, but she fled from me instead, like I was a monster.

She died that same day. I’d crawled through the smoke and the flames, searching for her, but all I’d found was a blackened body, flaking away even as I stared at it.

In my dream, she was whole and beautiful. The last time I’d seen her like this was when Marcus Tremblay tried to kill Mia. I’d tapped into Mia’s reserve of power, and for a brief moment, my connection to the elemental planes where materia came from—the secret chambers of the visible universe—allowed me to see Eve one last time. She’d forgiven me, even if I couldn’t forgive myself.

Now she smiled at me. “¿Qué pasa, amiga?”

“What are you doing in my dreams again?”

“What are you doing in our dreams?” The girl on Mia’s left spoke to me. I’d never seen her before.