"You have a show tonight."

"I could come right after the show. I could go straight from the show to the airport. I could be there by morning, Niki."

"Tomorrow night's Miami," Niki reminds her. "Miami and then Orlando on Wednesday, and then-"

"Why can't you just be quiet and listen for five seconds?"

"You can't miss any more shows."

"Niki, we're more important than the shows."

Niki touches the window, the cold plate gla.s.s, the invisible barrier keeping out the night, holding back the wind.

"We need the money. There's the mortgage."

"We're more important than the money or the G.o.dd.a.m.ned house," and Niki can hear the frayed edge in Daria's voice beginning to unravel completely. In a moment, she'll be shouting or crying or both.

"What did he say?" Niki asks.

"Who?"

"The a.s.shole, the guy who got your number. It must have been something pretty awful, the way you sound, the things you're saying."

"Yeah, well, we can talk about it when I get there, okay?

I really don't want to get into what he said, not on the phone."

"Where's Alex going to sleep?" and that last bit out quick, before Niki can consider the consequences, before she can weigh the damage her words will do. The way they'll cut, the blood they'll draw, how she can never take them back. Daria doesn't answer her, doesn't say anything, and the connection crackles faintly in Niki's ear.

"The bay is very pretty tonight, Dar. It's so pretty it doesn't even look real. It looks like a painting."

144.

Through the phone, she can hear the familiar sounds of Daria lighting a cigarette-the crinkle of cellophane, her thumb on the strike wheel of her lighter, the sudden rush of smoke from Daria's lips and nostrils. Behind Niki, Marvin asks for the phone.

"I'm trying to do the right thing," Daria says, her voice shaking, and Niki knows she's struggling to hold it steady.

"I'm tired, and I'm sick, and I'm scared, but I'm f.u.c.king trying to do the right thing."

"I think it's too late for that," Niki replies. Down on the bay, beneath the bridge, there's a sudden flash of light, and she stands up.

"Niki, please, don't say that. When I get back home, we'll talk. I mean really tal-"

"We should have talked a long time ago, Daria."

"I know that. I know that now."

"I don't think there's any time left for talking. Something's happening."

"No," Daria says. "Please, Niki. Listen to me. I can be there for breakfast. We can go to that place on the water-front you like so much."

Beneath the bridge, the light ebbs, flickers, and almost winks out. And then it explodes, a perfect circle of blue-white waves radiating across the black water, rushing soundlessly towards sh.o.r.e. Light so bright that Niki squints, then turns her head away. She lets the phone slip from her fingers and fall to the carpet, opens her mouth to warn Marvin, but then the blast wave hits and the hotel window comes apart in a storm of jagged, melting gla.s.s.

The light fills her eyes, burning them to wisps of steam.

Her skin turns black and curls like frying bacon, exposing flesh and bone and blood that boils away in an instant. The air stinks of cinders and ozone, and the California night has become a hurricane of fire.

The Dragon is awake and insatiable after its sleep. In a moment more, it will have devoured the city and moved on. Before sunrise, the whole world will burn inside its bottomless cauldron belly.

145.

"No," Niki Ky whispers. "Not yet."

The Dragon hears her and pulls back in on itself, a blazing serpent vanishing down its own gullet.

And there is no fire.

There is only the night, filled with possibility, with things that can be avoided and things that are inevitable.

Niki stands at the window, staring down at the dark waters of the bay. She can still hear Daria's voice, but now it's too small and quiet and far off for her to make out any of the words. Niki glances down at the cell phone, still right there in her good hand, and she sets it carefully on the windowsill. The bedsprings squeak, and then Marvin's holding her, asking her questions that she's too tired to understand.

"I'm sorry," she says to him. "Please, tell her I said that I'm sorry," and then oblivion opens itself wide, swelling to fill the s.p.a.ce between the hotel room walls, between horizons, and gives her a place to hide for a while.

For a long time, or a time that only seems long because there's no sun or moon, and no clocks nor anyone to remind her that time is pa.s.sing, Niki is nowhere, nowhen, and her thoughts are not important. There's no sorrow for Daria, no anger, no pain, no loneliness, no fear of her own insanity. Her hand doesn't hurt, and she doesn't remember the terrible things that no one else can see. And then somebody's talking, and the perfect nothingness is ruined, and she opens her eyes.

Or some other, more primal, part of herself.

She unfolds.

And she's standing in the front yard of Spyder's old house in Birmingham. There's a cool wind blowing through the pecan trees, rustling the limbs, the dry autumn leaves.

The night air smells like cinnamon and musty, windowless rooms where no one ever goes, and she looks up at the sky above the mountain. The stars are much brighter than they should be, or closer to earth, and they seem to writhe in the indigo heavens.

"Things happened here," Spyder says, speaking softly 146 from somewhere directly behind Niki. "Things that never should have happened. Things that violated and broke you.

The things that are killing you."

"I know," Niki says. "I've known that all along."

"Don't turn around," Spyder says. "You can't see me here. It isn't allowed."

"I wasn't going to turn around," Niki replies and takes a step towards the house. All the windows are dark, no lights in there, not an electric bulb or a candle, only the night choking every inch of wall and floor and ceiling.

"Why am I here, Spyder?" Niki asks. "I know this is where it started, but I don't know why I'm here. I feel like I'm going in circles."

"Yes," Spyder replies, "you are. Circles, and circles within circles."

"Then I'm never going to get anywhere, am I?"

The ground shudders beneath her feet; all the moldering leaves, the soil, the earthworms, and black, scurrying beetles, all the decaying, living matter, everything shudders, and Niki looks at the sky again.

"We're making this up as we go along," Spyder says.

"Why?"

"Because that's the way it has to be. Because that's the only way to keep it secret."

"From the black guard?" Niki asks her.

"From the black guard, and the priests who watch the Dragon, and the angels who are still out there looking for the stone."

"The angels," Niki whispers. "You made that story up, Spyder. That was just something you told them so they wouldn't leave you alone. There aren't any angels, not here."

Niki takes another step nearer the abandoned house.

"You can't go in there," Spyder says and grabs her shoulder before she can get any closer. "It's not what you see.

It's not what it wants you to think it is."

"I don't believe there's anything there at all. I think I hallucinated, and then I fainted, and I'm back in the hotel 147.

room. I think Marvin's wiping my face with a damp washcloth. I think Harvey's playing on the television."

The ground shudders again, more violently than before, and Spyder takes her hand off Niki's shoulder.

"I think I'm just a crazy girl. There are no bridges over lakes of fire, or dragons, or ghosts."

"I thought they would keep to this place," Spyder mutters to herself, as if she isn't listening and hasn't heard anything Niki's said, as though none of it matters. "I thought they'd have to keep to this place."

"No ghosts," Niki says again. "Not yours or Danny's. I make it all up because I'm sick. But I'm going to wake up now, and in the morning Daria will be home and everything will be right again."

"When was anything ever right, Niki?"

Niki takes another step towards the house, if only because the thing behind her, the thing from her head pretending to be Spyder, doesn't want her to, so maybe, she thinks, that's the way back.

"Don't," Spyder warns her. "You don't know, Niki. You can't begin to imagine what's waiting in there for you."

"It's just an old house, that's all. The house where you killed yourself. The house where your father went insane and raped you, and where your mother died. Just an old house, Spyder, full of bad memories. I've been there before. It didn't kill me then."

"I didn't let it. I protected you. I won't be able to this time."

"Then I'll protect myself. I'm a big girl now."

Behind her, there's a noise like rusted hinges and tearing cloth, and suddenly the air reeks of something lying dead and swollen beneath a summer sun.

"The bridge keeper should have killed you," Spyder snarls, and Niki hears her take a step, the fallen leaves crunching loudly beneath her shoes. "He should have saved us the trouble."

And- Spyder Baxter is standing on the porch of the house, 148 starlight dripping from her dreadlocks, the scar between her eyes glowing softly in the gloom.

"Don't turn around," she says. "Get down, and don't look behind you."

But Niki does turn and look, because if none of it's real, if it's all only bad memories and delusion, then there's nothing back there that can hurt her, and if Spyder's standing on the porch- The shadow thing beneath the trees smiles, and its yellow eyes roll back to show her the void held inside its skull.

"Get down, " Spyder says again, and this time Niki does as she's told. She falls to the ground, unable to take her eyes off the smiling thing, scrambling backwards towards the porch and Spyder.

"Too late," the shadow smirks, and it reaches for Niki with one ebony scarecrow arm. "She's seen me. She's seen me, and you know the rules."

"f.u.c.k you," Spyder growls, and the night air shimmers and sparks and sizzles around them. Overhead, the stars waver, then vanish as the ground shudders so violently that the trunks of the trees sway and creak. The shadow thing begins to scream a second or two before it bursts into flame, fire the immaculate color of the light from Spyder's cruciform scar. Niki stops crawling and covers her ears, but the screams slip between her fingers, through flesh and bone, and she can only shut her eyes and wait for it to end.

"Don't look at it, Niki. Keep your eyes closed as tight as you can and don't see it."

And when she's certain that the screaming will go on forever, when the force of the sound has become a weight pressing in on the frail boundaries of her body and soul and in only another instant she'll be crushed to jelly, Niki screams, too. Opens her mouth wide and screams until the night collapses, comes down in crumbling slabs and splintered moments, vomiting her back into the nowhere.

Niki Ky folds herself shut again, creasing herself as easily as tissue-thin sheets of origami paper.

Doors open, and doors close.

149.

And before the voices from the television and the gentle, incandescent light of the hotel room, before Marvin and the certainty of what has to happen next, what she has to do next, Niki looks over her shoulder, and even in this place that is no place, with the gulf of an eternity yawning between her and it, she can see the shadow burning.

One day in April, almost a year ago. A day when Daria was supposed to go with her to see Dr. Dalby, but then something came up at the last minute, the band or an interview or something else that couldn't wait, and so Niki went alone. It wasn't raining that day, but there was no sun, and the fog outside his office window was so thick there might have been nothing beyond it, the entire universe shrunk down to that one room and the old man watching her while he fidgeted with his mustache.

"You had to be there, I guess," Niki said. "It's complicated, what happened to Spyder."

"There's no rush," the psychologist said. "You can take all the time you need. You don't have to try to tell the whole story in one session."

Niki laughed and shook her head. "I couldn't tell the whole story in a hundred sessions," she replied and hugged the needlepoint anemones and geraniums.

"Then don't tell me the whole story. Just tell me the important parts, the parts that you think matter."

"Yeah, the parts that matter," she said and took a deep breath. Outside, the fog made gray, floating shapes, phantoms of water vapor and pollution to match the phantoms in her head. "That'll be a breeze."

"No, it won't. But it might be worth the effort."

"And it might not."

"That's right, Nicolan. It might not. It might be a dead end. A complete waste of time. That's just the chance you have to take."

And she drew another deep breath, a sip of water from the bottle on the floor beside her feet, and started talking, letting the past drain like infection. How she came to Birm-150 ingham, still running from Danny's suicide, how she met Daria and Spyder, the first night she heard Daria sing, the first time she saw the house on Cullom Street.

"There were all these goth kids who hung around with Spyder," she said and took another sip of water, swished it around in her mouth a few seconds before swallowing.

"They thought she was the coolest thing in the world, you know? They practically worshipped her. I suppose she gave them meaning, or purpose, or something."

"Did they resent you?" Dr. Dalby asked. "Did they see you as an intruder?"

"You're jumping ahead," she replied, and he apologized and told her to continue.