meeting someone's eyes is always risky. Every human being on earth knows what I'm talking about. Try it. Walk up to someone, without speaking, and look them in the eyes. There's a certain amount of leeway for a second, or two, or three. And then there's a distinct sensation of sudden contact, of intimacy. That's when regular folks normally cough and look away. Wizards, though, get the full ride of a soulgaze.
All things considered, I shouldn't have been surprised that when Helen met my eyes, it got uncomfortably intimate before a second had passed and…
… and I stood in Chicago, in one of the parks on Lake Michigan. Calumet, maybe? I couldn't see the skyline from where I was standing, so it was hard to be sure.
What I could see was the Beckitt family. Husband, wife, daughter, a little girl maybe ten or eleven years old. She looked like her mother—a woman with smile lines at the corners of her eyes and a white-toothed smile who very little resembled the Helen Beckitt I knew. But all the same, it was her.
They'd been on a family picnic. The sun was setting on a summer evening, golden sunset giving way to twilight as they walked back to the family car. Mother and father swung the little girl between them, each holding one hand.
I didn't want to see what was about to happen. I didn't have a choice in the matter.
A parking lot. The sounds of a car roaring up. Muffled curses, tight with fear, and then a car swerved up off the road and gunfire roared from its passenger window. Screams. Some people threw themselves down. Most, including the Beckitts, stared in shock. More loud, hammering sounds, not ten feet away.
I looked over my shoulder to see a very, very young-looking Marcone.
He wasn't wearing a business suit. He had on jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair was longish, a little mussed, and he also sported a stubble of beard that gave him the kind of rakish look that would attract attention from the girls who fantasized about indulging with a bad boy.
His eyes were still green—but they were the green of a summer hunter's blind, bright and intelligent and predatory, but touched with more… something. Humor, maybe. More life. And he was skinnier. Not a lot skinnier or anything, but it surprised me how much younger it and the other minor changes made him look.
Marcone crouched next to another young man, a now-dead thug I'd christened Spike years ago. Spike had his pistol out, and was hammering away at the moving car. The barrel of his 1911-model Colt tracked the vehicle—and its course drew its muzzle into line with the Beckitt family.
Marcone snarled something and slapped the barrel of the gun away from the family. Spike's shot rang out wild and splashed into the lake. There was a last rattle of fire from the moving car, and it roared away. Marcone and Spike piled into their own car and fled the scene. Spike was driving.
Marcone was staring back over his shoulder.
They left the little girl's broken body, limp and spattered with scarlet, behind them.
Helen saw it first, looking down to the hand that gripped her daughter's. She let out a cry as she turned to her child.
In the wake of the gunshots, the silence was deafening.
I didn't want to see what was coming. Again, I had no choice.
The girl wasn't unconscious. There was a lot of blood. Her father screamed and knelt with Helen, trying to stop the bleeding. He tore off his shirt, pressing it to the child's midsection. He babbled something to Helen and ran for the nearest phone.
His white shirt soaked through as Helen tried to hold it to the weakly struggling girl.
This was the worst part.
The child was in pain. She cried out with it. I expected her to sound horrible and inhuman, but she didn't. She sounded like every little kid who had ever suddenly found herself faced with her first experience of real, nontrivial pain.
"Owie," she said, over and over, her voice rough. "Owie, owie, owie."
"Baby," Helen said. The tears were blocking her vision. "I'm here. I'm here."
"Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," the girl said. "Owie, owie, owie."
The little girl said that.
She said it over and over.
She said it for maybe sixty seconds.
Then she went silent.
"No," Helen said. "No, no, no." She leaned down and felt her daughter's throat, then desperately pressed her ear to the girl's chest. "No, no, no."
Their voices, I realized, sounded almost