I can’t describe it. I can half explain it: Mick had been in my head several times. Frances once, but she’d been there. Frances herself had said that there was a connection between a Horseman and the horse, a link that remained after the contact was broken. That the connection became relevant just then might have been an accident. I wanted it to be. I didn’t like to think that either Frances or Mick could hate me so much, or be so cruel without cause.

I lay on my side hugging my knees, biting the inside of my mouth, while Mick and Frances made love in the next room. I didn’t move until Sher knocked on both doors and said it was time to go.

Card 7: Fears

Ten of Swords

Waite: Death, pain, desolation. Advantage, profit, success, power, and authority, but all transient.

Douglas: Desolation and ruin, but with the idea that it is a community, rather than individual, tragedy.

Crowley: Reason run mad, soulless mechanism, the logic of lunatics and philosophers. Reason divorced from reality.

Case: End of delusion in spiritual matters.

7.0: Off to see the wizard

“Well,” said Frances, “have we forgotten anything? Hot dogs, pickles, potato salad, ants — you did bring the ants?”

“Frances,” I said, not for the first time, “that’s enough.”

The trike was parked on the apron of an unused garage door, in a service drive between Loondale and the empty Gilded West tower. That put it near our preferred exit route. We’d circled Ego on foot, and were now on the opposite side, at Ego’s front door, where the guard station was. It was five minutes to midnight.

“I suppose we’ll have to do without the ants.” She tilted her head back and looked at Ego’s top, where the ring of white lights shone smugly, and running clouds edge-lit with moonlight made the view look like the opening shot of a horror movie. “Use it while you’ve got it, Tom. And so will I. May the best fiend win.”

“Is the best one more fiendish, or less?”

“When we finish this, you have my permission to tell me.”

“If I still can.”

She looked at me, and opened up a moonlit death’s-head grin. “If I can hear you.”

“On that jolly note — it’s time.” I headed for the doors as Frances tucked herself in the shadows of the door embrasure. She wore something dull and dark and snug, with a pocketed vest of the same stuff. The fabric didn’t make any sound when rubbed against itself. Motionless, out of direct light, she disappeared.

I pushed through the door and squinted under the bare bulb at the guard station. There were two men there, swapping gossip as their shifts overlapped. One I’d never seen before: an earnest-looking youngish man with short, sun-bleached blond hair. The other, a big man with a heavy red beard and a Santa Claus belly who occupied the desk chair, was a regular on the midnight-to-eight shift. I almost smiled at him. He did lousy work.