“You should pay attention,” the man said, his tone flat. “I am telling you the most important thing you have heard in your life.”

His companion took a deep breath then opened his eyes and looked at him. “Fine. Do go on.”

The man said, “There is another game beyond the game of kings. It is a shadow game, and it has been played for millennia behind the panoply of human things. Like politics, the board and the pieces of the shadow game have shifted and changed through time, but in this game, the players have remained the same. I have just removed a piece from the game. We should call him a bishop. Like any chess piece he could only make certain moves, but they were damn good ones. I’ll give him that for his epitaph.”

“You had a man killed because of a game in your head.”

“No, I had a man killed because he could sense changes in spirit as he stood near his king and worked to protect him. With this man out of the way, I now have much more leisure and opportunity to take the king. All it will take is the highest-level security clearance, the right time and place and a handshake, and when I do it, it will strengthen my position in the game tenfold.”

“Oh I see. So basically you had a man killed because of a game in your head. I suppose I could congratulate you,” said his companion. “But I won’t.”

“Indeed,” said the man. The corner of his mouth twitched. “The fact of the victory will have to be congratulations enough.”

The ancient game, so long played, was coming to a head. There had been many peaks and valleys over the years, intense maneuvering and vicious skirmishes followed by periods of quiet and a wintering of conflict. Dared he hope they were at long last heading into the endgame?

The man remembered his first years on earth, that giddy rush of exhilaration he had felt after having been imprisoned for so long. He had been free at last and this whole world lay before him like a virgin with her thighs spread wide.

He had to admit it might have gone to his head a little.

He had not been a happy camper when he had found that a group of his people had followed him to earth. That first conflict . . . A frown marred his handsome brow. He didn’t like to remember it.

It had begun so well, his first life in this place. He had lived in a golden land, and his childhood had been one long ascendant journey to self-discovery. He had been born to rule, not by birth but by ability, and by right, and he had taken that golden land of Babylon and made it his own. He became king and imposed his law, his order, enacting his own manifest destiny.

The group that had followed him had been fresh and at full strength, in the morning of their first birth into this world. They had just recovered their full memories from their earlier lives, and they had acted in concert to take him by surprise. Barely escaping with his life, he had been forced to go into hiding deep underground in the dark, airless catacombs of his city.

One of his enemies at the time had written: How the oppressor has ceased! How his insolence has ceased! . . . How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!

But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit. Those who see you will stare at you, and ponder over you: Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who would not let his prisoners go home?

The author of that histrionic piece had been a stinking prophet with the burned gaze of the mad. He had come from an aggrieved and superstitious desert people that had been comprised of twelve tribes.

They had been too ignorant to realize the value of what he had brought to his kingdom, or the value of what he could have given to them, the education and learning, the technology and the civilization. They preferred to wallow in the heat and dust, and to plunge into constant petty wars as they worshipped their angry, vengeful God.

It had taken the man a long time to heal from the wounds he had gotten in that first battle on this world. But he had, and he could not forget, and he did not forgive. Among his many other projects and hobbies, he had made it his mission to hunt down the group who pursued him, and to destroy them. In fact, in that endeavor, he had enjoyed some degree of success.

The old bitch, though. He shook his head as he straightened his tie. She was a pistol. She’d gotten mighty dexterous at avoiding him throughout the centuries. But he had one huge advantage over the group that had come after him. He did not have their code of ethics. He had no ethics whatsoever that would hold him back from using his special talents in whatever way he wished.

The folks from home had liked to call him an aberration. He preferred to think of himself as unique. It had a much more positive spin.

As a result he was as strong and fresh today as a man in his prime, with all memories intact and all grudges well-nurtured. From what hints he’d been able to glean from the psychic realm, the old woman had let herself become frail as well as elderly. That wasn’t the brightest of ideas when involved in a long-term war such as theirs.

Over the ages he had accumulated an awful lot of grudges against her.

Triumphing over her was going to be downright orgasmic.

But first things first.

About that chess piece he’d just removed. The bishop. Nicholas Crow had been too educated for a normal human, too much of an adept in things that most people knew nothing about. The old bitch had scattered her teachings like a virus throughout the first nations, so it was actually possible that Crow had been taught what he had known by a native elder.

But he had to wonder. Perhaps the old bitch herself had trained Crow. If so, the man might find a trail of breadcrumbs in Crow’s past that would be advantageous for him to follow.

However, the very next thing the man needed to do was hunt down Dr. Mary Byrne, who had turned out to be a rather surprisingly slippery fish. And loud. Her psychic energy was blazing like a comet. At the rate she was going, she’d be a burned-out husk in a day or two. That was not the preferable option of events.

He had to find Mary fast if he hoped to get anything useful out of her. Just out of curiosity, he also wanted to find out what had happened to his two drones. They had almost gotten her, but then he had lost his connection with them. Now he couldn’t make psychic contact with either one. Neither was answering his cell, so the man had to assume for the moment that they had somehow been destroyed.

Also, the police reports he received about what had happened in Mishawaka were preliminary and confused, but rather interestingly freakish. He needed to get a more accurate account of what had happened, so he could determine what forces had been involved and decide what to do next.

He knew one thing for certain. Mary Byrne was acting in an unpredictable manner. Keeping track of her comet blaze in the psychic realm wasn’t much of a problem, but actually catching her in the physical realm was going to be more of a challenge, which was why he relaxed in the back of his limousine while his driver took him toward northern Indiana.

Old adages became adages in part because they were true. If he wanted something this important to be done right, he was going to have to do it himself.

“Enough about me,” he said to his companion. “Tell me about yourself. How are your teeth? Healthy? They look good.”

His companion sat in the seat opposite him, a handsome dark-haired young male with a clever, narrow face. The male had been bound with expert care to ensure his captivity but minimize bruising and stress on the joints.

“Fuck you,” the male hissed.

Oh dear. He was too bored to roll his eyes. He just could not get a decent conversation off the ground with this one.

He straightened the cuffs of his suit jacket. “Yes well, we don’t have time for that. Tell me about your medical history. You look like you work out. Do you have cancer, a congenital defect, or a heart condition? How about an infectious disease?”

“You kidnapped me to talk about chess and my medical history?”

Yawn. “Very well. If you’re not in the mood to talk about yourself, let’s talk about your ex-wife, Mary. I want you to tell me everything you know about her.”

“I’m not telling you a goddamn thing.”

“That’s what they all say, Justin. There have been so many of them over the years, and they have all been so very wrong.”

Mary was another pistol. It had been simply ages since their last tête-à-tête. He missed talking to her. It was going to be a pleasure to get his hands on her again.

The sleek black car sped down the road, quiet as a bullet shot through a silencer.

Chapter Nine

SOMEHOW MARY MANAGED to pull away from the restaurant without clipping anybody else. In a crisis of shock and pain, her breathing erratic, she drove by rote until she found herself parked in front of a huge old Victorian house in an older tree-lined neighborhood close to Howard Park, near the St. Joseph River.

The house was more utilitarian than its sprawling gingerbread-trimmed neighbors. It was covered in beige aluminum siding, not painted, and fringed with sturdy plain white gutters. There were no perennials or shrubbery planted in its miniscule front lawn. It had been divided into apartments, and the backyard converted into an asphalt parking lot.

She had shared the upstairs apartment with three other women while attending Notre Dame. The rent had been cheap and there had been no cockroaches, so she had counted herself lucky although sometimes she had felt as if she would have been happy to sacrifice a limb for some privacy.

Muscle by muscle, she forced herself to unclench her death grip on the steering wheel. Then her body jerked as a new wave of dread hit. She twisted in her seat to search for any sign that she’d been followed or was being watched.

All she found were the peaceful sights and sounds of a quiet neighborhood settling into dusk. The adrenaline faded, to be replaced by bone-rattling tremors and the faint roil of nausea.

She was going to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder over this day. She had earned it, she was planning for it and nobody was going to take it away from her.

What happened made no sense. Who would want to attack her? What was she running from?

How did those men know her name?

She didn’t know anyone or anything. She certainly didn’t own anything anymore. Nobody had whispered a mafia deathbed confession to her in the ER. The whole thing might be laughable except that four people were dead.

[struck, overpowered, carried to a black, unmarked van]

A wail built at the back of her throat. She clenched her teeth and swallowed the sound. If she started making noise, she might not stop. Worse, she would draw unwanted attention to herself.

[so many hawks, swirling like a storm in the jewel-toned sky]

She couldn’t just sit here outside her old apartment. This street was too trafficked. Sooner or later someone would notice.

She inspected the abrasions on the heels of her hands and dismissed them as minor. Then she tilted the rearview mirror and checked the damage to her face, pressing light fingers along her swelling cheek and jaw. The damage wasn’t too bad. If she were at the hospital she would order x-rays to check for bone fractures, but that would be just a precaution.

What hit her in the solar plexus, causing her mouth to wobble and eyes to blur, was the bright spray of drying blood that dotted her face and hair. She looked down. She was covered in other people’s blood.

[flat, popping noises, the blossom of ruby stars on a child’s T-shirt, and four people falling]

She pressed both hands to her sore mouth, panting, until the fresh wave of nausea had passed.

Oooh-kay. Okay. Usually she only dealt with that much blood in a medical facility where she was insulated with scrubs and the duties of her profession, and she wasn’t clammy from shock.

She had to wash, but she couldn’t walk into a public restroom looking the way she did. She looked around. The unopened bottle of water she had bought earlier lay in the passenger seat, where she had thrown it after the drive-thru. She also kept a first aid kit and a change of clothes in a gym bag in her trunk.

A block ahead of her, a car turned onto the street. Twin beams of light flashed across her face. The car approached at a slow pace. She twisted at the waist and bent down, drumming her fingers in a rapid tempo against the water bottle until the car had passed.

She had to move. Definitely.

She started the car and drove around to the back of the apartment house, and pulled into the parking lot. There was only one car parked in the slot closest to the house. A Dumpster squatted in the corner of the lot like a giant, bloated orange insect. She pulled the Toyota around and backed toward the Dumpster then popped the trunk.

Switching off the engine, she jumped out and limped to the back of the car as she glanced around. Dusk was deepening fast. The spring warmth from earlier that afternoon had fled, leaving behind a deepening chill. The windows from neighboring houses threw golden rectangles of light across the darkening backyards.

She didn’t see or hear anybody outside.

Did that matter? Would she be able to hear anybody in time to avoid them? How paranoid should she be?

That woman in the Grotto said she had a powerful enemy.

She guessed that meant she should be pretty paranoid.

[We’ll kill everybody in the restaurant if we have to. Not that we’d mind. We like to kill.]

Who talks like that? Nobody does.

She yanked her cotton sweater off and pulled it inside out, shivering as she inspected it under the dim light in the trunk. The only spot she could find that was not soiled was inside the back. She opened the bottle, splashed water on the material and scrubbed hard at her face, hands and arms, wetting the sweater as needed. While she worked to clean herself, she took a mouthful of water, rinsed her sore gums and tongue and spat out rusty liquid. Then she swiped at her braid with the ruined sweater, threw it in the Dumpster and yanked open the gym bag. A worn white T-shirt, a pair of jeans, underwear and old, blue canvas shoes were tucked inside.