No signs marked the location of the buildings or gave evidence of the nature of the work conducted within. The buildings were drab and unremarkable and occupied space just east of Occidental Park in the Pioneer Square district of Seattle. The International District lay just to the south above the Kingdome. Downtown, with its hotels and skyscrapers and shopping, lay a dozen blocks north. Elliott Bay and the waterfront lay west. Clients were plentiful; you could find them on the streets nearby, if you took the time to look.

Fresh Start and Pass/Go were nonprofit corporations funded by Seattle Public Schools, various charitable foundations, and private donations. Both organizations were the brainchild of one man—Simon Lawrence.

John Ross looked down at his feet. Simon Lawrence. The Wizard of Oz. The man he was supposed to kill in exactly two days, according to his dreams.

The elevator doors opened and he stepped in. There were stairs, but he still walked with difficulty, his resignation from the Word’s service notwithstanding. He supposed he always would. It didn’t seem fair he should remain crippled after terminating his position, given that he had become crippled by accepting it, but he guessed the Word didn’t see matters that way. Life, after all, wasn’t especially fair.

He smiled. He could joke about it now. His new life allowed for joking. He wasn’t at the forefront of the war against the creatures of the Void, wasn’t striving any longer to prevent the destruction of humanity. That was in the past, in a time when there was little to smile about and a great deal to fear. He had served the Word for the better part of fifteen years, a warrior who had been both hunter and hunted, a man always just one step ahead of Death. He had spent each day of the first twelve years trying to change the horror revealed in his dreams of the night before. San Sobel had been the breaking point, and for a while he thought he might never recover from it. Then Stef had come along, and everything had changed. Now he had his life back, and his future was no longer determined by his dreams.

His dreams? His nightmares. He seldom had them now, their frequency and intensity diminishing steadily from the time he had walked away from being a Knight of the Word. That much, at least, suggested his escape had been successful. The dreams had come every night when he was a Knight of the Word, because the dreams were all he had to work with. But now they almost never came, and when they did, they were vague and indistinct, shadows rather than pictures, and they no longer suggested or revealed or threatened.

Except for his dream about Simon Lawrence, the one in which the old man recognized him from the past, the one in which he recognized that the old man’s words were true and he had indeed killed the Wizard of Oz. He’d had that same dream three times now, and each time it had revealed a little bit more of what he would do. He had never had a dream three times, even when he was a Knight of the Word; he had never had a dream more than once. It had frightened him at first, unnerved him so that even though he was already living in Seattle and working for Simon he had thought to leave at once, to go far, far away from even the possibility of the dream coming to pass.