Now the room was turning gray and their narrow circles of light were starting to fade.
"Do you know what time it is?"
Fortunato looked up. Veronica stood next to him in pink cotton panties and a ripped T-shirt, arms crossed over her breasts. "Almost dawn," he said.
"Are you coming to bed?" She turned her head sideways and waves of black hair fell across her face.
"Maybe later. Don't stand like that, it makes your stomach stick out."
"Yes, o sensei." The sarcasm was muted, childish. A few seconds later he heard the bathroom door lock. If she wasn't Miranda's daughter, he thought, he would have put her back on the street weeks ago.
He stretched, stared for a few seconds at the murky clouds taking shape in the eastern sky. Then he went back to the Work in front of him.
He'd covered the five-pointed star on his floor with tatami, and on them he'd laid the Mirror of Hathor. It was about a foot long, with an image of the goddess where the handle met the solar disk. Her cow horns made her look a little like a medieval jester. It was made of brass, the front reflective for clairvoyance, the back abraded to rebound an enemy's attacks. He'd ordered it from an aging hippie in the East Village and had spent the last two days purifying it with rituals for all nine major deities.
For months he'd been increasingly unable to think of anything but his enemy, the one who called himself the Astronomer, who'd commanded a vast network of Egyptian Masons until Fortunato and the others had destroyed the nest he'd made at the Cloisters. The Astronomer had escaped, even if the evil thing he'd brought from space hadn't. The months of silence had only made Fortunato more and more afraid.
The Bornless Ritual, the Acrostics of Abramelin, the Spheres of the Qabalah, all of Western Magick had let him down. He had to use the Astronomer's own Magick against him. Had to find him, somehow, despite the blocks he'd set up that made him invisible to Fortunato.
The trick to Egyptian Magick-the real thing, not the Astronomer's warped and bloody version-was to go at it from their reverence for animals. Fortunato had spent his entire life in Manhattan, Harlem at first, then downtown once he could afford it. To him animals were poodles that left their shit on the sidewalk or listless, foul-smelling caricatures that slept their lives away at the zoo. He'd never liked or understood them.
It was an attitude he could no longer afford. He'd let Veronica bring her cat to the apartment, a vain, overweight gray tabby named Liz, in honor of the movie star. At the moment the cat was asleep on his crossed legs, her claws hooked into the silk of his robe. The cat's primitive value system was a doorway into the Egyptian universe.
He picked up the mirror. He just about had the mind-set. He watched his reflection: lean face, brown skin a little blotchy from lack of sleep, forehead swollen with rasa, the Tantric power of retained sperm. Slowly his features began to melt and run.
He heard a sound from the bathroom, a muffled sigh, and his concentration broke. And then, instead of the Astronomer, he was looking into the mirror and seeing Veronica. She sat on the toilet, her panties around her ankles. In her left hand was a pocket mirror, in her right a short piece of red-striped soda straw. Her head rolled loosely on her neck and she rubbed her cheek against her shoulder.
He put the Mirror of Hathor back on the mat. The junk didn't surprise him; it was just that she would do it here, right here in his apartment. He moved the protesting cat off his lap and went to the bathroom. He popped the lock with his mind and kicked the door open and Veronica's head jerked up guiltily. "Hey," she said.
"Pack your shit and get out," Fortunato said. "Hey, 's jus' a li'l coke, man."
"For Christ's sake, how stupid do you think I am? Do you think I don't know smack when I see it? How long you been on this shit'?"
She shrugged, dropped the mirror and straw into her open purse. She stood up, nearly tripped, then saw her feet tangled in her panties. She balanced herself on the towel rack while she pulled them up and snapped the purse closed. "Couple months," she said. "But I'm not on anything. I jus' do it sometimes. 'Sense me."
Fortunato let