"And there are a couple that give me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s but Bunco's never caught 'em out on anything.

Like there's this medium not six blocks from here.... You game?"

"M'love," she said slowly, "That is not a bad notion."

Diana stared down the barrel of a gun, tasting fear cold fear in the pit of her stomach. The business-end of the thing looked as long as the Lincoln Tunnel and twice as black.

It was a.357, to be exact. It was pointed at her midsection, held in the hand of a most nervous gentleman who was not, and had never been, a medium.

She refocused from the weapon to the man behind it; thin, very dark Cuban, she thought. Little scraggle of moustache; crewcut. Hyper to the max. She could feel a trickle of sweat down her back as she tried to think at lightspeed.

I can't pull my piece. He's too far away to jump.

She kept her eyes fastened on the man's face, knowing that his eyes would warn her before he pulled the trigger Sensei says I'm good enough to dodge bullets, but this isn't how I wanted to find out!

She froze her expression into a mask of total fear as her mind ran through the position of every stick and exit in the room. The sour reek of mildew and the dust in the air almost made her sneeze which she didn't dare; that would surely trigger him to shoot.

"Please," she whispered in Spanish, pleadingly, "I don't understand...."

The man spat something in Cubano dialect so thick she couldn't make out the words. Something about informers, she thought There was the door behind him; a window behind her.

If I could throw myself backwards no, it's barred on the inside.

To right and left, two cheap dinette chairs, aluminum and red vinyl. One had been hers, one his.

Nothing else but the table just bare board walls and rough wooden floor, sagging in the middle. The chairs?

Not heavy enough to stop a bullet.

Between Di and the gunman, there was only the table draped with a stained red velvet tablecloth.

On the table lay something other than a crystal ball.

A sealed baggie of white powder, to be precise. Not what she had expected and her face had given her away.

Smack. G.o.ds help me, a heroin dealer. Where in h.e.l.l is Mark? Never mind that; you're an empath project, dammit!

She oozed innocence, helplessness, from every pore, projecting with every erg of energy she had to spare.

Hey man, I'm nothing but a stupid chick looking for a fix on the future, not a drug fix. I just walked in here by dumb accident. I look just like your airhead kid cousin She held out her hands, empty, imploringly. The gun wavered. The man's thin face turned puzzled, then predatory.

Good oh good, I hit a nerve. C'mon, sweetie, remember how you used to want to get into your cousin's pants?

She turned down the innocence, turned up the s.e.x. "Please," she stammered, "I'll do anything you want "

It was working. She could read it in his eyes, in the flavoring of his emotions. He was still going to kill her but now he was thinking that he was going to have some fun, first.

Mark, where the h.e.l.l are you?

The man grinned; his teeth were stained and yellow, and too large for his thin face. He looked like a horse, truth be told. An ugly horse.

The muzzle of the gun moved a little aside; it was no longer pointing at her, but at the floor to her left. The man was relaxed now, his finger easing a bit on the trigger And there was a familiar presence at the window behind her.

Mark!

She waited; prayed he'd see the opening she had created. Held her breath and felt the tension behind her arc to a peak.

A welcome shout. "Down!"

She obeyed, throwing herself to her right, rolling on her shoulder, and coming up with her own gun in her hand as three shots crashed through the window to take the drug pusher in the head, neck, and chest.

The man was thrown back by the impacts, jerking with each hit his face and torso blossomed into ruined meat. The last shot sent him sprawling on his back in the doorframe. The body twitched, then stilled.

She fought down nausea. Oh G.o.ds I can't I dammit, I've seen plenty of bodies before, I oh G.o.ds. She swallowed, tasted bile, swallowed again. I've got calm, calm, back to balance She managed to distance herself for an instant; it was enough She started to holster her own gun with hands that shook, then thought better of the notion.

That b.a.s.t.a.r.d might not be alone. Just because you don't feel anybody in the house So she stayed right where she was, crouched in the darkest corner, ears alert for any sound, however small.

It seemed an age before she heard a footstep she knew, and Mark's whistle.

Di sprawled on the pa.s.senger's side of the Ghia, half in, half out, holding her hands out in front of her with a look of exhausted concentration.

Both hands were trembling like cottonwood leaves in a high wind.

The block had been cordoned off and Narcotics was dealing with the mess inside. There must have been ten squads parked, and half as many unmarked cars; the place was swarming with cops, uniformed and plainclothes. So far as Mark was concerned, he was overjoyed to have them around.

"Well that's a new one," Mark mused, as Di slowly brought her shaking hands under control. "A pusher setting up as a medium "

"I'm not too surprised he gave you the creeps," she replied, her voice dulled with fatigue. "My G.o.d, what a scam. You just trot up to the door, and say you need help that got you in the door. Then you say that Angelita sent you. That got you to the table. Then I guess whatever your 'problem' was told him how much and what you wanted."

"And you just stumbled on the code words here " Mark reached behind the seat of the Ghia, took out a thermos, and poured her half a cup of lukewarm coffee. She took it from him, and managed not to spill any.

"Not quite I was extended and feeling for trigger phrases. Sometimes I can do that if my subject is pretty hyper ""Considering he was dipping pretty heavily into his profit margin, I should figure he'd be hyper!"

Mark replied, looking up to see the shrouded body bag being carried out to the ambulance. "He was heavy into c.o.ke. From what I found in the other room, he'd done two, maybe three lines before you came tapping on his door, and his stuff wasn't cut much."

She shuddered. "That G.o.ds. That's the closest I've ever come to getting ventilated, honestly.

Arcane danger I can deal with but I swear, Mark, if I'd had any idea what was going on in there I never would have walked into that one. That was not a job for me that was for the pros. G.o.ds, it was worse than anything occult."

"s.h.i.t, I wouldn't have let you walk into that. But you did okay, spooky," he said softly, sincerely.

"You did okay. You did everything exactly right, like we'd practiced it. Narcotics is real happy with both of us right now."

She glanced over at him, and he saw that the makeup covering her black eye was beginning to run.

She managed a wan smile. "We pick up some points, partner?"

"More'n a few. You about ready to call it a day?"

She sighed and handed back the thermos top. She'd drained it so dry there wasn't even a hint of liquid left in it.

"It's a day," she said.

Sherry woke before Bobby's moans of fear grew loud enough to really hear. But she heard them as she usually heard them.

Mother's instinct, she thought, feeling what was shamefully close to relief when she realized that the other half of the bed was as empty as when she'd gone to sleep. At least Robert wasn't back yet; he was more hindrance than help when Bobby was in one of these states, growling at him that he was being a baby and that it was time for him to grow up She slid out of bed without bothering to turn on the light, using only the dim illumination from the readouts of the various high-tech goodies in the bedroom to see by. As she hurried down the hall, the carpet warm and soft beneath her bare feet, Bobby began to cry.

She sat on the edge of the bed and began stroking his forehead, waking him gently. She'd found out the hard way that waking him at once left him dazed and petrified with fear for nearly an hour, and that turning on the light made things worse.

She murmured his name, softly, as she gentled him and finally the dull, weary crying stopped. "M - m-mommy?" he faltered.

"I'm here, baby," she said, only now taking him into her arms. "It's okay, you just had another bad dream."

Thank G.o.d this dream hadn't been as bad as the ones of the past three nights where he'd woken up drenched with sweat and screaming about blood. He was just a little warm, and clung to her with trust rather than the despair he'd shown then. She hugged him close, breathing the soapy-clean scent of his hair as he tucked his head under her chin.

"Better?" she asked.

He nodded a little. "Mommy?" he asked, finally, "When's Mark going to come over again?"

"I don't know, munchkin," she replied, wishing that she did know the answer to that question, and shifting a bit so that the bedsprings creaked. "What brought that on?"

He sniffed, and she felt him scrub at his eyes with the back of his hand. "The Mean Ladies," he said, finally.

"Is that who you were dreaming about?"

He nodded again, his hair tickling her chin. "They don' come over when Mark's here."

Perceptive little lad, aren't you? she thought, startled. Two of the three models had been over after dinner this evening; Lupe and the youngest, Conchita, the one with the come-hither eyes and the air of a girl who'd trip a man she wanted and beat him to the ground....

Sherry stroked Bobby's hair and schooled herself not to tense up; he would read that, he was very good at body-language. No doubt, that was what had kicked off tonight's nightmare, his picking up the tension between herself and Robert.The initial tension, anyway; once Lupe had decided to exert her charm, she'd succeeded in lulling all of Sherry's ugly suspicions away until she and her sister had left with Robert ostensibly heading for the studio.

But once they had gone, the suspicions returned.

Bobby went limp, which told her he'd fallen asleep. She eased him back down into the bed and tucked the covers around him, carefully and slowly, so as not to wake him again. But when she returned to her own bed, it was to lie wakefully staring into the dark.

Robert had gotten so strange since last year. Yet the personality changes she thought she was seeing were hardly fitting any pattern. Some might have thought them positive. He'd become almost a workaholic sure, he was playing around with the girls, but a good many of those photo sessions really were what they were supposed to be; Robert had the photos to prove it. He hardly slept more than three or four hours a night anymore; the rest of the time he was out at the studio was what he said....

But the relationship he had with the girls went far beyond the flings he'd had before. The five of them seemed to be able to communicate without words, and to be wrapped up in some secret project or other that obsessed all of them. It was a relationship that left Sherry totally on the outside, and feeling like a stranger.

She longed for the times when Mark appeared for an evening; then Robert went back to his old self, laughing, joking relaxed, with no signs of the cold intensity that frightened her so much.

Mark was such a good friend; so compa.s.sionate, trying so hard to be the buffer between Robert and herself. He was giving Bobby the male affection he needed, the affection Robert couldn't seem to show.

But then Robert was an only, with an ultra-macho father, and Mark came from a huge family, all of them used to showing their feelings openly. It was too bad Mark's family had scattered all over the globe parents in California, one brother in Minnesota, one in Vermont, two in the Navy, and the sisters in Seattle, Chicago and Florida. Only his aunt remained But Mark's loss was Sherry's gain. She didn't think she'd have been able to cope without his help, now that Robert had gotten so strange.

She turned restlessly, and stared at the glowing numbers of the digital clock without really seeing them. She wondered where Robert was tonight. He never bothered to tell her where he was going anymore.

But it wasn't as if he was being cruel it was more that he was preoccupied with whatever was obsessing him.

She suddenly wondered if the girls could be getting him involved in some kind of cult It would certainly fit the symptoms: the preoccupation, the personality changes, the way he behaved when he was with the girls, like they were all part of some in-group.

If it was a peyote or mescaline cult, that would make even more sense. It would account for the reason he was sleeping so little, and for the incredible energy he seemed to have these days.

Psychogenic drugs had caused positive personality changes before this but if they were giving him delusions of grandeur, that would account for the way he'd been distancing himself from Sherry and Bobby In the next moment the notion seemed stupid. Robert had never been interested in any sort of religion, not even back in the sixties, and he'd been loudly and impatiently scornful of those of their friends who'd been into the drug scene. She couldn't see any reason why he'd change now.

Maybe it was her.

Maybe maybe she had just gone dull since Bobby was born. She used to share in what he was doing, even to helping in the darkroom; she hadn't done that in at least a year. In fact, she'd closed herself off from him letting her jealousy of the girls drive her out of the room when they appeared, dismissing shots of them with a feigned boredom. She'd been closing herself into the workroom more and more and G.o.d knows Robert had always found her craftwork yawnacious.

Maybe it was her fault that they were drifting apart.

She wished she could talk with Mark; he always listened so patiently. And when he did give advice, it was generally good. And she could always count on him to be honest; if this was her fault, he'd tell her.

And maybe he could tell her how to get Robert to show a little affection to his son Dear, sweet Mark, she thought, as she finally became tired enough to drift into sleep. He's always there when I need him.SEVEN The windowless room was darkened, shadow-shrouded, and echoingly empty. Oddly shaped metal structures, like robotic mantises, were pushed into one corner. Dim reddish light came from somewhere behind a ma.s.sive chair, the only piece of furniture in the room. There was a man in that chair, a man hardly more than a deeper shadow within a shadow.

The door opened, then closed softly again, and a woman stepped into the barren room, her footsteps echoing from the pale, blank walls. Her name had been Lupe. Now it was Chimalman; fitting, for that had been the name of a great woman warrior and she was now a warrior of a different sort.

She had come straight from the street without pausing to change into more suitable garb. Although it was not fitting, she was clothed as these northern invaders were. She hurried to the thronelike chair, and once there, prostrated herself at the feet of her lord and G.o.d.

He brooded, unspeaking, his shadows and silence taking on a palpable weight, that his priestess might feel the ponderous bulk of his power before he acknowledged her presence.

Her costume did not please him; she knew that he had more than once rebuked her for appearing before him in such clothing. He was making her feel the weight of that disapproval before he would move on to the business that had sent her out into the street.

"Speak," he said at last, in the old tongue. The single word filled the room.

"The witch is still baffled," the girl replied, not daring to raise her head from the floor. "But she is not deterred. She is more stubborn than I had antic.i.p.ated and the man "

"What of the man?" Some vague emotion sharpened his tone, and she trembled.

"He is clever and he is working with her, warrior with warrior. He is as much of a danger as she "

"No!" The G.o.d leaned out of shadow, and his servant, now gathering her courage enough to raise her face a trifle, could see conflicting emotions at war within him by the subtle clouding of his eyes.

"Lord?" she replied tentatively. When the G.o.d warred with himself, sometimes it boded ill for his handmaidens.

"No." He settled back into his seat, back into the shadow. "No, the man is not to be tampered with.

Nor, for now, the witch. So long as she remains baffled "

"And if she does not?" she ventured tentatively.

"Witches " he pondered that for a moment. "They are chancy to deal with at best. I do not know the powers of this one and this land is her home. I know not who or what she may call upon. The wise warrior does not waste his strength. She could cost us more than we can afford at this early stage. Yet she is only one hear me; if she sniffs too closely upon our trail, warn her off in a way that she cannot mistake."

"And if she will not heed the warning?"