to take stock, and then rest for a few days, but those days never came. Instead, it was Athens, and now here. You're exhausted because you're exhausting yourself."
"You're right," I said. "I shouldn't be doing that. It's just..."
"I didn't say that you shouldn't. I only pointed out that you are. In order to make that kind of judgment..."
I sat forward, looking at my hands while his sentence hung in the silence. I knew what he meant. He couldn't judge what was driving me until he knew what it was. And even I didn't know that. Now that he pointed it out, I could see the pattern, one decision after the next, always pushing a little harder, a little faster. Covering ground.
It was that there was so much to look at. To catalog and discover. But that wasn't it either. Even as I tried out possible answers, I knew I was dancing around something. At the heart of it, the issue was more difficult and more painful.
My hands ached. Without realizing it, I had bunched them into fists so tight my knuckles were white. Chogyi Jake still hadn't broken the silence.
Silence which shouldn't have been there. The fountain, the wild brass band, the street noise. All of it was gone. My head jerked up. The lobby was perfectly still. Chogyi Jake's mouth was half open, caught in the middle of his thought. His eyes were empty as a stuffed bear's. The water from the fountain hung in the air like a thousand glass beads. Outside the window, a pigeon was suspended behind the glass in mid-flap.
A tiny sound-no more than the click of dry lips parting-rang out like a shot. I whirled.
The black woman I'd seen walking across the street stood at the foot of the stairs, leaning against her cane, regarding me sourly. She wore an old dress of brightly colored cotton, flowers blooming on her in red and green and orange. She'd taken off her hat, and gray hair framed her face like a storm cloud. Her lips had the lopsided softness of a stroke victim, but her eyes were bright with rage. When she spoke, her voice had the depth of a church bell and the threat of a power saw. It wasn't the voice of a human being. It was one of them. A rider.
"What the hell you think you doing in my city?"
Chapter 3
THREE
The last time I'd been in swinging distance of a rider, it tried to throw me off a skyscraper. The adrenaline hit my bloodstream as the first word left the thing's mouth. My body leaped even before I knew I was going to do it, streaming through the unnaturally still air toward the thing in the woman's flesh. I think I screamed. The paralyzed lips opened in what might have been a sneer, and the bright metal of the tripod cane knocked me against the wall like I was a softball.
My head rang. Blood tickled the nape of my neck. The woman was chanting something now, her head bobbing from side to side in a way that was both avian and serpentine. Something brown and gray dangled at the end of her thin hand. The air around me began to writhe. I'd felt this once before; the barriers between Next Door and our world growing thin. The things that lived on the wrong side were coming up toward me to feed. I gathered my will the way Ex and Chogyi had taught me, drawing myself up from the base of my spine, through my heart and throat and out, projecting my qi in a shout.
"Stop!"
The woman staggered, her chant losing its rhythm. The things pressing against reality fell back a little. I moved forward, wary of the reach of her cane. Around us, the world was still as statues. The woman bared her teeth. A vein bulged in her neck, straining with effort. The floor seemed to vibrate against my shoes. The woman raised her fists. Her left hand-the one not holding the cane-was limp, barely able to close.
"I will kill you," she spat. "No sun gonna set on me."
"Bite me," I said.
She screamed, and a play of light came from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. It shimmered like sunlight reflected off the surface of a pool; fire and water made one. Mirrors and crystal chandeliers caught the light, shattered it and made it sharp. Something washed over me, and I staggered. My head was full of cotton, and the blood on