Summer sunsets gave way to nightly strolls home from work, without my crow. I looked up and saw the sill's candle glowing for me in my window. Four pairs of eyes watching me from the dark behind the glass, as I stood staring up from under the light of the last street lamp. I had to cross the dark vale between lights. No part of my nerves had forgotten the feeling of being hunted by the Folk of the Shaded Places.

One step in front of the other. This is my new way: I take that step and then I take another. My own words had long abandoned me. Even my crow had learned to speak without poetry or profanity. I hadn't heard the word 'death' in a memory that lingered. The truth had found its way into a closet and some long armed claw had dragged it away forever. I'd forgotten my promise to Agent Saint in those days. It was easy to do when I had two daughters to come home to from a job that I had learned to love. My old life felt childish. I looked back on my time spent fearing monsters and demons and ghosts. Absurdity has a way of making those things into silly stories describing fading memories. Were they all just dreams?

Cory often told me I was in a dream, and it meant nothing to me. The ache in my right hand was a heartbeat, a ceaseless companion. I knew it once came and went and was a pain. Now it was ever-present. I ruminated on the presence of so much mist, if life was but a dream, after all. I did not care. I had sacrificed and killed to be where I was. I soaked up every golden moment of it. A year rushed by, each day a little better as things kept getting easier and more wondrous.

I held Penelope up to the light. She was little Penelope Justice Briar-Leidenfrost. One year's old and destined to great things. I was secretly delighted at her chimerism. After one year her eyes had changed color from light blue to one right eye of gold, like mine, and one of purple, like her mother's. My instinct to love her when I saw this, overwhelmed me. I had secretly loved her mother more than I loved anyone, never revealing that I loved her best-of-all. It would be unfair to Isidore and Persephone and also to my crow.

The voice of the ghostly thoughts of Detective Winters, whose spirit I carry within me, had never even noticed, so guarded were my feelings.

I realized I loved our creation more than I loved her mother. And there was one betrayal from Dr. Leidenfrost that broke my heart. It wasn't her lust for other men that bothered me. How could it? She told me several times that she was faithful to me and I believed her. No, it was something she did to Isidore that hurt me. Dr. Leidenfrost candidly did a paternity test on Persephone, Isidore's daughter. When I found out, she had already told Isidore what she had done and what the results were.

I found Isidore with her, in a terrified and mournful state. Then Dr. Leidenfrost told me why. She didn't have to say what the results of the test were. Isidore's discomfort told the whole story. I just went to the girls' room and sat and watched them sleeping. I ignored what had just happened and nodded off in that chair.

Later, Dr. Leidenfrost apologized. She swore her friendship to Isidore and that she wanted to raise Persephone as my child, alongside Penelope. She never explained why she had to establish that Persephone wasn't mine or that Isidore was to be called out for her duplicity. I resented what Dr. Leidenfrost had done because I couldn't understand how it could be necessary.

"Don't let these women fool you. They are enjoying themselves right now, observing your reactions. It's just drama." Detective Winters had his own opinion. Not a very sophisticated one, but sometimes a man needs to listen to his crude instincts. They are a compass, at least. Arguing with him would only excite him, so I said nothing.

"I told my Lord of this, long ago." Cory walked and hopped and skipped across the carpet, a little dance he had seen Birds of Paradise doing on the Discovery Channel. He thought himself so amusing, always the jester in the apartment.

"Nay, foul bird." I muttered in clicks at him in our hybrid speech.

"I see no bird of that nature here, my Lord. I kept my word and said nothing more than I should. Think I know nothing?" Cory hopped excitedly, willing to converse in our old tongue. His chirps and clicks and vague crow moans were stirring the girls. That was as much of the old way of talking as we conversed in a long time.

Sometimes I missed the home of the Winters. I thought of the good times there. Vague were the circumstances of my departures. Twas the arrivals I smiled to recall. Ahhh, home.

Then I recalled the creature's pathetic death, a blister of infection popping out the sea. The emergence of the chaos to come, before it is many things, just the death of one thing, one thing that should never have lived. I hated the thought; despised that truth. I wanted no reminders of that in the form of the same place. Nor the nightmares I had feverishly dreamed while near that festering sore of the world.

I liked living there, loved my job, my family. It was a dream and dreams are no different from reality, when both are malleable by memory and history in the same plane of the past. I know that now, of course, as I know my whole life now, having seen my own death and knowing its approaching day and hour as I live. For that mistake, for that error, I am a fool.

In the book I am reading it says that when a demon sees its fate it ceases to exist. Just as man knows the sum of his days only at the moment when they end. A demon still binds its fate to a wisdom of existence. To know it in total is to be at its end. To believe in death is to be dead.

My demon was gone from me, by accident. As I learned my death its connection to me was severed. I thought of where it was bound beneath the earth. A clacking monkey chime doll. It had exploded into those weird sticks when Detective Winters shot it.

"Its fate and mine were to be the same. Now it is dead." I commented. I realized the book was correct in its presumptions about demonic limitations, at least in this one regard. I hoped I never met another demon. A futile hope of course, but at least for awhile I knew no more demons. Familiarity with demons is like living a life under constant hostile surveillance. Always they await opportunity to whisper a sound, fog the air with a fume or turn one's attention from where it should be. A demon unbuilds; destruction is its game, piece by piece it breaks the teeth of the world.

Sometimes I wonder if the world really needs such teeth.

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Such cruel teeth.

They glimmered in the darkness, the smile of a nocturnal predator. His beard was braided and the gray of his fur shone in the moonlight as he stepped out from the moonshade to guide me. I followed the four-legged sorcerer, not looking from his tail by habit. There in the grove there was a perfect circle of stone. It was at the level of the dirt and roots and plants and yet it was entirely clear of them, swept free of them. He meowed at me repeatedly until I stepped onto the stone, exhaling.

I fell backwards into the holly and lay panting. I sat up, no different than before. I looked where the stone was and saw it was as nature saw it, covered in dirt and vines and the fallen branches of nearby trees. Even the holly I had landed on was as the forest floor. I looked around bewildered by the seachange.

"Just a little magic." Said the cat.

"I understood you." I spoke back.

"Say it in Felidaen." He commanded.

I repeated myself, translating my own words into meowing. The stone had taught me their language, somehow.

"Now, remember that you are not to unbehold her majesty. Don't even blink." He warned me. "Come with me as I leap to her."

I placed my hand upon his back as we hurtled free of the ground. We tumbled through the stars briefly and then stood upon the colored circle of the throne room. I looked up to see the goddess of the cats. I wasn't sure what I was looking at. My vision was conflicted by my emotions; the turmoil of spirit and thoughts within. Was it a beautiful woman with the head of a cat? This being wasn't a mere animal, it had many forms, many ways. It was very old; a creature from before Dawn, even. I knelt, enthralled. It took no effort to behold her without fail.

"My mother, this is the man that has assembled every jewel of the Majara. I bid him do these errands. His obedience has made this possible." Ket spoke to her on my behalf.

"There is a reward for this man." My guide told the other cats of the court. A suspenseful purring arose among them.

I was terrified. I was not a worshiper of this creature. I might as easily be destroyed as rewarded.

"Your reward is your very life. You shall be spared." Ket determined.

"I shall take you home." My guide promised.

"It would be convenient to destroy you. Now that you have served your purpose. You served well and I wish to show that we can reward even the vermin that plague us, that is the extent of divine clemency and power." Ket seemed to address the other cats as he sad this.

I was momentarily home; the feline assembly had dismissed me. Cory asked me if I was discharged from my bond to the cats. I told him that I was and that I had learned Felidaen, only for the purpose of being presented to their goddess. He doubted it until I spoke to him in Felidaen. We both laughed.

Then Cory thought and asked: "Did you find out what-all-that they stole, through you, was for?"

"The Majara" I told him.

"The death of all things that annoy cats. It was just a crazy genocide wetdream of theirs. Guess they have the key to it now." Cory mused darkly.

"Wait, what?" I gasped. Humans annoy cats. Crows too.

"Its some kind of magical doomsday device." Cory told me.

"We have to find a way to stop them." I exclaimed.

"Surely those books about the occult have mentioned it? I thought my Lord knew." Cory brought up my occult studies. I had begun to neglect them at increasingly longer intervals. I was forgetting my past, even as I learned more about it.

From that moment I began desperately to seek the catalog that would lead me to the definition of the Majara. It was not mentioned online where I could find it, nor the library, occult bookstore or anywhere. It was in Felidaen that I began to research it. The glyphs of cat in certain Key of Sercil had me going as prehistoric cat comics, at first. They were not funny though, when they described the very object of my search, yet in so superficial of details so as to be useless. I already knew it was a jeweled device of some kind. I knew more than that already.

The Key of Sercil was only a companion to an older and nastier tome. I needed the Book of Sercil. I found not even mention of its exisence in the Key, yet passages showed that the two had met and words from one had found their way into the other. A book that referenced its own place where it was meant to rest, what books among it should rest. It claimed that Sercil's resting place was also the place where all of Sercil's fraternity of sorcerers rested and also the Sons of Araek. At least that is what was quoted from the mother tome. A book mentioned within a book. I wondered already if my own story would one day be read as fiction. Would people believe in the Folk? Would I seem like a liar? A madman perhaps?

Surely the fact that I killed John Monica would interest someone.

I saw the bullet hole in the trash can, the paint cracked angrily around it. I looked up and knew instinctively how the game was to be played. The gun was fully loaded and every bullet had my name on it. He wore a thick gray gaiter and had eyes of piercing gold that made mine hazel by comparison. He always had a smile in his voice and the steadiness with which he leaned forward made him seem like a hawk about to swoop from its perch.

"That one was a gift. I left it there yesterday. Cops will come again to a shooting here. Maybe it will take more time, maybe less. Probably more." He monologued oddly. It was the one time he bothered. I was his favorite. He had no intention of ending the game yet.

"I should go." I told him nervously.

"Shale." He told me.

"That you?" I wondered, since he just said the word so oddly.

"Private Eye."

"Looking for someone?" I asked him.

"Samual Monica hired me to find the man who slaughtered his son." Private Eye Shale now used his gun to punctuate for his monotone speech.

"I see." I watched the gun bounce along his words like a karaoke ball. He was hired to do more than find me.

"Ten thousand." He smiled brightly and the glimmer in his eye reminded me of someone. A healer I had met long ago. Healers make the deadliest killers.

"To kill me?" I gulped.

"For each bullet I put in you that doesn't kill you." Private Eye Shale waited just a moment. Then I felt a punch on my stomach and another in my groin and I staggered back. The flash and gunsmoke greeted me sweetly as the echo faded. "Dance."

He let me have four more before his revolver clicked empty. "That's all I got for today."

I fell forward and bled into the darkness. I knew I wasn't going to die. I recalled how I would die, the shock of the second time seeing the vision my beard became splattered in white hairs and so did the rest of my head. The tree was still in my eyes as I awoke in the hospital where Dr. Arefu has seen too many miracles.

"Someone paid for surgery to make sure you will fully recover." Dr. Arefu had me sign for the surgery.

"So they can kill me again. Probably in-person next time." I told her. I couldn't speak and she couldn't hear my gasps as words. I enjoyed a second coma in my favorite place. When I die I will soar off to that distant time and place, Dawn.

It was the anniversary of that last moment where I still doubted it wasn't just a dream, despite the ache in my hand. Even while I slept, so unnerved. I found the tome there. I knew then it could not be glimpsed any other way. It was only visible between life and death and between the dream and the world outside the mists. There could be no confusion, not when I stood there with my own hand as a beacon.

Cory was there as a shadow leering at me. He found it to be the most amusing joke in the world that I could barely distinguish between the thresholds of the light of the surgery table and the dreams of death, going into the light. Maybe I wanted to die. I wasn't sure, wasn't afraid. One world seemed interchangeable for another. Cory decided to say something, despite his great amusement:

"My Lord thinks crows count in a bizarre way. Do know that cats tread this reality in-between at regular passages." Cory advised me.

I turned the pages and read every line of it to my crow. Would my bird become a sorcerer, I doubted it. He had no magic in his blood. Or so I thought.

I turned the pages uttering profanity from an antique code to my crow.