"We are," Fanshawe told her in dull monotone, "But we have to go somewhere else first." More unbroken blackness flowed past the windows. "It won't take long, but I'll need your help, and what you need to know is..."

The headlights reached out into still more blackness.

"Is what?" Abbie asked, partly suspicious, partly amused.

"It's f.u.c.ked up," Fanshawe said baldy. "If you're not up to it, then I'll take you back to the inn. But the way I see it is"-he shrugged, and glanced at her cocaine-"what have you got to lose?"

Abbie laughed. "How can I argue with that?"

"You're kidding me?" she said, frowning. "You're stealing this?"

"Yeah," Fanshawe said, and without hesitating, he began to unscrew the tarnished globe off the Gazing Ball's bizarrely inscribed pedestal. "I'll explain later."

"But-"

Fanshawe paused, irritated. "You in or out? Make up your mind."

"Stew! I don't know what's going on!"

"Keep your voice down. I think your father's at the tavern with his friends, but I can't be positive."

"What's my father got to do with-"

Fanshawe glared at her in the moonlight.

"Like you said, what have a got to lose?" She chuckled to herself. "Okay."

Fanshawe finally detached the ball from the pedestal. He handed it to Abbie. "Take that back to the car...carefully."

By now Abbie didn't even challenge her confusion, but when she took the globe... "Hey, this feels like it's got something in it."

"It does. Take it to the car." Fanshawe leaned against the pedestal, then began to rock it back and forth until it dislodged from the ground. With a grunt, he hoisted it up.

Abbie stared at Fanshawe. "Come on, Stew. What's in the globe?"

Fanshawe huffed, dragging the pedestal. "The ashes of Jacob Wraxall's heart," he replied and then trudged down the hill back toward the car.

Abbie, with her mouth hanging open, stood there for a while holding the ball.

Eventually, she followed Fanshawe.

You will give to and take from the same, Fanshawe recited Let.i.tia Rhodes' strange prophesy as his shovel bit down into earth. He wondered if it was really true that they buried people six feet deep.

If so, he was in for some work.

When Abbie had seen what he was doing, she scurried away, either back to the car, or as far away from him as she could get.

Oh, well.

This was the second stop before his return to New York: the cemetery behind the community church. He dug at a gravestone which read GEORGE JEFFREYS RHODES.

"I will give to and take from the same," he whispered aloud, digging. "Yeah, I guess I will..."

As it turned out, the coffin lid was uncovered beneath less than two feet of earth. It didn't take very long for Fanshawe to unseat the tiny casket and take it back to the car.

All in a day's work, he thought, thunking closed the Audi's trunk. He wiped his hands off on torn, urine-damp Dolce & Gabbana slacks, then got back behind the wheel. Somehow, he wasn't surprised to find Abbie in the pa.s.senger seat, looking sh.e.l.l-shocked. Can't say that I blame her... He pulled away and drove off in darkness.

Not a word was spoken until they were on the freeway.

"I'll explain everything in time," he said.

She looked at him, mouth still hanging open.

"But let me ask you something. How do you feel about kids?"

"What?" she croaked.

At once, Fanshawe's enthusiasm bubbled forth. There was so much of it. "And why should we beat around the bush? We're not getting any younger, you know. h.e.l.l. Let's get married," and then he eyed her with intensity.

She looked like a mannequin in the dashlight. "Stew, I just watched you dig up Let.i.tia's Rhodes' dead baby."

"So?"

Abbie rubbed her face.

"I told you, I'll explain all that," he said. "But not now. You're not ready for it yet-you've just got to trust me on this."

She tried to say something but couldn't.

"You want to know what this is all about? I'll tell you. It's about transposition. It's about metamorphosis. We have the opportunity to shed our old skins and become the new us. It's not much different from what you were saying before. Why should we force ourselves into society's mold instead of being what we want to be in our hearts?"

Abbie paused in the ceaseless drone of tires over asphalt. "What are you in your heart, Stew? A warlock? Is that what this is? You want to be a warlock and you want me to be-what?-your sorceress?"

Fanshawe reflected. He'd never felt so wonderful in his life. "Like I said, I'll explain everything when you're ready."

"This is crazy!" she exploded. "That's got to be it-you're insane, certifiably insane! You've got the trunk filled with a bunch of occult-looking s.h.i.t I've never seen before, you tell me Jacob Wraxall's ashes are in the Gazing Ball, then you dig up a dead baby and practically in the same breath you want to get married to a c.o.kehead and have kids! Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?"

Fanshawe remained calm behind the wheel. Several miles beyond the guardrail, the lights of a town dazzled. "Take this and look at that town," he said. He handed her the looking-gla.s.s. "That's how crazy I am."

Outraged, Abbie recognized the gla.s.s. She put it to her eye and pointed it at the nighted town beyond.

And fainted.

I knew it. She's got a black heart too. Just like me...

It was a comfortable thought.

Fanshawe smiled. He switched on the satellite radio and filled the car with a quiet violin concerto-Vivaldi, he suspected. Or maybe Corelli. Then he put on the cruise control, leaned back in the plush seat, and drove.

EPILOGUE.

ONE YEAR LATER.

Since he'd been a young child, Fanshawe had always admired Manhattan's triangular Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, so after his first salvo of speculative stock market buys, he'd easily purchased the spectacular twenty-two-story monument as his own. This, he decided, would be his new home, on the entire top floor. In the cusp of unparalleled luxury was where he wanted his child to live and to learn.

Several chambers of that ma.s.sive penthouse suite had been reserved for Fanshawe's "research."

Further market speculations had officially made him the wealthiest man in the world, in fact, exactly six months after his return to New York, which Fanshawe found not only satisfying but quite appropriate: six being the imperfect number and the emblem of his new Benefactor.

Abbie-if only temporarily-had overcome her cocaine addiction, not via rehab but more provocatively by forced abstinence. Fanshawe had locked her in a posh, luxury-stuffed room and kept her there until the birth of their son three months ago. The love he'd felt for her early on-like most things pertaining to human relationships-had moldered as quickly as a dog t.u.r.d in the sun.

When he wasn't touching base with his multiple companies, he pursued his new and wondrous calling with unrestrained zeal: following in the alchemical and occult-scientific footsteps of Jacob Wraxall. And as for his impoverished, pitiful obsessions of old? Those paltry urges no longer existed. He had far more crucial things to do now, things which excited him exponentially more than peering at woman in windows.

He'd mounted the Bridle in the building's center court, whose security and privacy he'd seen to at tremendous (but now inconsequential) expense. Jaunts back into the past, however, were no longer needed, and the miraculous Bridle's inscribed orb no longer contained the ashes of Wraxall's heart. Those ashes were now kept in a memorial urn mounted in the bedroom.

Instead, the orb contained the ashes of the heart of one George Jeffreys Rhodes. With this instance, luck had accompanied Fanshawe, along with Mrs. Anstruther's information that Let.i.tia Rhodes' unfortunate baby had been embalmed with town donations-hence, the infant's heart had not decomposed. Thanks to the intricacies of the first of the Two Secrets, Fanshawe was able to transplant himself selectively into the future rather than the past. The limits of this occult travers.e.m.e.nt was seventy-one years-the life span that would otherwise have been enjoyed by Let.i.tia Rhodes' son. It took some rather strenuous mental conditioning, meditation, and certain "oblations" (Fanshawe thrilled in reducing New York's homeless population), but after only a few weeks of this, Fanshawe found that he had received the blessing he'd asked for, just as Wraxall had said he would.

When his heart felt the blackest, he pushed himself forward.

Six months ahead was enough, and then only five minutes in the public library was all it took. He'd gone online, looked up the year's best low-to-high earners on the Dow and NASDAQ, and returned to his own time with enough data to make billions on the marketplace. He knew that as he honed his talents (and further conditioned the blackness of his heart) his reconnaissance surveys would take him more and more distantly into the time ahead of him. Indeed, he would ama.s.s more riches than any man in history.

Lucifer, be praised, he thought.

"It never gets old," Abbie said in a hush. Midnight had tolled minutes ago, when Abbie had taken her usual place at their huge bedroom window twenty-two stories up. She was scanning the guts of Manhattan (back when it was not called Manhattan but instead the Isle of Manna-Hatta by the Wappinger Indians) with one of the looking-gla.s.ses. She was utterly engrossed.

"What's that?" Fanshawe said, not quite hearing her. He closed the door behind him.

"The view. It's just so spell-binding, I never get tired of it. It never gets old."

IT doesn't but YOU do. He walked up behind her and gazed out into the nighted city with his naked eyes, watching the dazzle of millions of lights and millions of people; yet knowing that what she saw was equally beautiful in an opposite way. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Which gla.s.s are you using?"

"Evanore's-it's my favorite. To think that New York City looked like that in the 1670s."

"I know. It's incredible." And YOU, my dear, are an incredible waste of s.p.a.ce. Fanshawe learned quickly that "love" was just another mode of pa.s.sing fancy. After the baby had been born, she'd served her purpose. She'd become wine gone stale.

The bowl of cocaine next to her was nearly gone, while it had been half-full this afternoon. Fanshawe didn't care about it now; he'd only cared that she be off the dope during her term, to protect the baby.

But now?

She can snort a pound of that s.h.i.t every d.a.m.n day for all I care. In fact, I HOPE she does. He knew he'd be intrigued to watch her incrementally wither to nothing. She was halfway there already.

"The Mothersole gla.s.s is pretty awesome too-it goes back fifty years earlier than Evanore's. Remind me and I'll bring it out tomorrow," but this was just so much idle talk. He looked at her from behind. What's she down to now? A hundred pounds? Ninety-five? The unrestrained plunge back into her addiction had turned her arms to pasta-colored broomsticks; her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had lost half their girth. Her face was a skin-covered mask.

She paused, raised a solid-platinum spoon to her nose, and snorted. Then she took to looking through the gla.s.s again.

Fanshawe smiled.

They'd never actually been married; in fact, no one even knew she was here. And as for Mr. Baxter and any trouble he might make?

Fanshawe had envisioned the potency of his calling without delay, and then he'd made certain arrangements with certain persons amenable to the discharge of certain enterprises in exchange, of course, for a previously agreed-upon fee. Within a week of Fanshawe's taking Abbie to New York, Baxter, Monty, Howard, and that a.s.shole in the Yankees shirt had tragically perished in a fiery car accident.

Money talked, and Fanshawe had developed a big mouth.

Dr. Marsha Tilton, too, had met with a regrettable mishap, in her own parking garage, no less. Similar persons had introduced themselves to the astute psychiatrist, and after hauling her into a van and ra- Well, what more need be said? Fanshawe simply didn't like the idea that she knew so much about his embarra.s.sing past.

On the other hand, Let.i.tia Rhodes must've realized that Fanshawe had been the mysterious hand-of-charity that had paid off her property taxes; therefore, she would make the same deduction once the annual million dollars were wired into her account. He felt a distinct kinship there, and, It's the least I can do, considering what I took from her...

He stood a while longer watching Abbie stare enraptured through the gla.s.s. Between that and the cocaine, she couldn't have been more content.

"I've got some work to do now," Fanshawe said.

"Goodnight, honey," she murmured. She just kept staring out the gla.s.s.

Fanshawe left the room.

Perfect...

From the east balcony, he gazed out into the glorious night. What he saw in the stars were promises that couldn't be measured...

Later, he raised one of the looking-gla.s.ses to his eye and watched Madison Square Park disappear and be replaced by dark, tree-crowned hills and dirt-scratch trading trails which would later emerge as Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Street, Broadway. Torches flickered on those trails just now, as Dutch settlers armed with blunderbuss rifles guarded a caravan of merchant wagons. Fanshawe heard distant drums beating-tom-toms-from the remaining pockets of obstinate Indians. Periodic shrieks shot out (war cries?), and low, rhythmic chants. But farther north, where Gramercy Park would one day spread, the log-hewn walls of Peter Stuyvesant's essential first settlement came into focus, campfires burning bright.

It's all history, he thought. And I get to see it.

Lately, he'd been thinking. Since he'd brought Abbie to New York, Fanshawe hadn't once traveled out of the country or even out of the city: his apprenticeship was too important. But now that he was grasping the Art of Deviltry with confidence, the idea of travel excited him. Rome, London, Athens, Hong Kong? Naturally, he'd bring some of the looking-gla.s.ses with him, to see those great cities as they'd been three centuries ago. And with his money and connections?

Procuring the bones of corpses hundreds of more years old, or even a thousand, seemed quite feasible. There was no limit to the sights he could behold.

And who knew? He might even bring the Bridle with him...

In the wee hours, Fanshawe went to the baby's two-thousand-square-foot suite and told the guard and night nannies to take a short break. Much gold, chalcedony, and jasper decorated the suite, along with fineries that would stagger the most indulgent sultan. Above, great skylights of nearly indestructible Lexan commanded the beauty and sheer vastness of the universe. This is what Fanshawe wanted his son to see whenever he might awaken at night.