He reached the edge of the crowd and ducked into an alley. Garbage was littered about in large piles. Three steps in he heard the howl. Spector stopped and looked up. The Astronomer, smiling, was floating down toward him.

"I told you what would happen, Demise. You had your chance." The Astronomer howled again, a throaty, inhuman bellow.

Spector turned and ran back into the crowd, pushing past people, knocking them down. He ignored their threats and curses and fought his way into the street. He dodged through the startled band members, then ran past a crepe float of the Turtle and into the mass of people on the other side. He was afraid to look back.

A policeman grabbed him by the arm. Spector kneed him in the crotch and pulled away. People all around him were screaming. He could barely breathe.

"I'm right behind you." The Astronomer's voice was close. Spector turned. The Astronomer was hovering by the policeman, who had raised his pistol to fire. Blue light leapt from the Astronomer's right hand, connecting with the weapon. The gun exploded, showering the policeman and spectators with shrapnel. More screams.

Spector tripped over a trash basket and fell hard to the concrete sidewalk, skinning his hands. He stood slowly, his knees wobbling. He felt hands grip his shoulders, fingers digging powerfully into his flesh. He couldn't pull away.

"No." Spector's voice sounded just like Gruber's had earlier.

The Astronomer let go with one hand and grabbed the top of his head. "Look at me when I speak to you, Demise." Spector felt his head being spun around. There was a stab of unbearable pain, a snap, and his mouth filled with blood. The Astronomer grinned at him. "It's Judgment Day."

Noise ran through the crowd behind them. The Astronomer turned away, distracted by something, dropping Spector like a sack of garbage.

His body was paralyzed; he couldn't break the fall. Spector landed face first on the sidewalk, smashing his mouth and nose. He watched the pool of blood widen around his open mouth. It was time to die, again. At least he wouldn't have to see or feel what was going to happen to him.

Side by side and bumper to bumper, the floats took up a block and a half of Center Street south of Canal. Fortunato could see Des, the elephant-faced joker, done up in chickenwire and flowers. There was Dr. Tod's blimp and Jetboy's plane behind it, complete with floral speed lines. A clear plastic balloon of Chrysalis floated overhead.

This was deep Jokertown and there weren't so many tourists here. The tourists that came this far down didn't bring their kids. Drivers in coveralls stood by the floats, smoking and talking to each other. The worst of the crowd seemed to all be moving the same way as Fortunato, toward something that was happening up ahead.

Half a block away he could see the lines of power in the air. Like heat waves, shimmering, distorting everything around them. It was a signature that wasn't really a signature, a set of psychic eraser marks. He'd seen them for the first time seventeen years ago, in a dead boy's room not far from here, where women had been brutally cut to pieces as part of a conspiracy that ended with the great, devouring monstrosity of TIAMAT orbiting the sun.

He was lightheaded and his pulse was going crazy. He realized that he was scared, really, honest-to-Christ terrified, for the first time in seventeen years.

He sent a wedge of power out in front of him and ran toward the place where the lines came together. People spun away on both sides of him, shouting at him but unable to touch him.

Demise screamed. Even over the noise of the crowd Fortunato could hear the crunch of mangled bone and cartilage and the thud of a body hitting the sidewalk.

As he broke through the wall of people, they were already turning, trying to get away. Somebody dragged away a wounded cop, his right hand burned black, his face pocked with blood. There was a ten-foot circle of sidewalk, empty except for Demise.

Demise lay on his back, the lapels of his gray suit and the open collar of his scruffy shirt exposed. His head was turned completely around, his face flat against the pavement. Blood ran out of his mouth and nose.

A man in the crowd was screaming. "There! He's right over there! He's getting away! Stop him, for God's sake!" He was pointing at nothing at all. All Fortunato could see was a blur of faces, like he was trying to look too far to one side, even though he was staring straight ahead.

Jamming me, he thought. He focused his power and slowed time, until the man's voice and the moans of shock and disgust around him dropped to a subsonic rumble. A tornado of psychic energy hungin the frozen chaos around him, Demise's power, Fortunato's own, the viral energy of the jokers. It was hopeless.

He let go and time came up to speed. There was nothing he could do. Demise was dead. It was not much of a loss.

Most of what he knew about Demise was second- or thirdhand, picked up from cops and bystanders after the riot at the Cloisters. He was a loser a middle-class failure who'd caught the wild card and died of it in Tachyon's clinic. Tachyon brought him back and Demise never forgave him for it. He'd come back a projecting telepath, so they said, and what he could project was the memory of his own death, strongly enough to kill with it. For a while he'd sat at the Astronomer's right hand, until Fortunato and the others had destroyed their base at the Cloisters and Fortunato had blasted their Shakti device into atoms.

He'd have done the same for Demise and the Astronomer if he'd been able. But now Demise seemed inconsequential. From a sense of wounded aesthetics Fortunato got on one knee and twisted Demises head the right way around. He was about to walk away when Demise said, "Thanks. I needed that." Fortunato turned back, his skin crawling. Demise squatted on his heels, rubbing the swollen purple lumps in his neck where blood vessels had burst. Already the bruises were turning yellow, healing as Fortunato watched.

Demise smiled. His mouth was a little too long and thin, and it came up too high on one side. The smile was full of terror and the man's hands shook so hard he held them up and laughed at them. "Didn't know about that little trick, did you? I got my little black message I can send and I got this other thing, too. Even the Astronomer didn't know about it. I can heal, brother." He hacked up a gob of blood and it was a solid brown crust by the time it hit the sidewalk.

"Then he thinks you're dead," Fortunato said.

"Christ, I hope so. Not that he wouldn't have gone ahead and ripped my heart out, just to be sure, if you hadn't shown up. Son of a bitch even told me he was going to do it. If I had stayed in Brooklyn maybe I could have kept out of his way." He coughed up another lump. "If the dog hadn't stopped to piss he would've caught the rabbit."

"Why does he want you dead?"

"Thinks I sold him out. All it was, after that shit at the Cloisters, I started thinking another line of work might be healthier." Demise stared at him. There was a spark back there. Fortunato could see it. If not genius, at least some craft and cunning. Most people wouldn't see it because people didn't spend much time looking into Demise's eyes. One way or another.

Behind the spark was something else. Fortunato had seen it before, seventeen years ago, when he brought a dead boy back to life. It was the black despair of having looked at death too closely.

"In fact," Demise said, "I'm surprised he didn't take you out while he was here. Unless he's saving you for dessert."

"Dessert?"

"This is it, man. Judgment Day, he calls it. I'm gonna die, you're gonna die, every one of you fuckers that hit him at the Cloisters is gonna die, and it's all coming down today. With all this other shit going down in Jokertown he doesn't have to worry about cops or anybody else getting in his way." Fortunato had a sudden hunch, a convergence of invisible power lines. "You know anything about some stolen books? Or a man named Kien?"