There was a touch of gray on his muzzle now, but he still moved like a younger cat most days. She sent him the warm feeling she thought of as love. He purred and sent her the image of the calico keeping the kittens away from Jack's Victorian furniture. If not closely watched, the kittens found the lion's-paw legs wonderful scratching posts.

Well, old friend, Jack turned me down again last night. What do you think is wrong? The subvocalized question received only a querying look from the cat at first, but then he sent the image of a hundred of Bagabond's creatures around her.

Yes, I know you're all there, but every once in a while I want another human. She created the image of the black and the calico together as mates. The black returned a vision of Bagabond and a human-sized cat. Bagabond nodded as she looked over at the kittens at play. Not my type, unfortunately. She wondered why Jack refused to sleep with her. Her frustration and lack of understanding were beginning to turn to anger. It had only begun the last year. Each time she played with the kittens, she felt a lack in her own life.

The feeling angered her, but she couldn't deny it. Recently she had turned to Jack for confort, but for once he had turned her away. She resolved not to ask again.

Without the layers of dirt and ancient clothing that protected her in the world outside, she knew she was not unattractive. To spare her other friend Rosemary embarrassment, she had learned to dress on rare occasions in an acceptable fashion. It never felt right, though. Those were the times she was really in costume and she hated them. Perhaps she had become too involved with Jack and Rosemary. Perhaps it was time to go underground again.

The black followed the tone of her thoughts, even if he could not translate their abstract meanings. He added his approval of their severing the relationship with the humans by sending an image of some of their former lairs.

But not today. Today I have to go over to see Rosemary. Bagabond pulled herself up out of the chair and walked over to piles of old, dirty and shapeless clothing, which provided most of her wardrobe. The black cat and two kittens followed.

No, you're staying here. Jack may want to reach me. Besides, it is hard enough for me to get into her office without you along. She shifted her attention. Blue coat or green army jacket?

There were thirteen black candles in the room. When they burned, the wax turned the color of fresh blood and ran down the sides. Now the room was turning gray and their narrow circles of light were starting to fade.

"Do you know what time it is?"

Fortunato looked up. Veronica stood next to him in pink cotton panties and a ripped T-shirt, arms crossed over her breasts. "Almost dawn," he said.

"Are you coming to bed?" She turned her head sideways and waves of black hair fell across her face.

"Maybe later. Don't stand like that, it makes your stomach stick out."

"Yes, o sensei." The sarcasm was muted, childish. A few seconds later he heard the bathroom door lock. If she wasn't Miranda's daughter, he thought, he would have put her back on the street weeks ago.

He stretched, stared for a few seconds at the murky clouds taking shape in the eastern sky. Then he went back to the Work in front of him.

He'd covered the five-pointed star on his floor with tatami, and on them he'd laid the Mirror of Hathor. It was about a foot long, with an image of the goddess where the handle met the solar disk. Her cow horns made her look a little like a medieval jester. It was made of brass, the front reflective for clairvoyance, the back abraded to rebound an enemy's attacks. He'd ordered it from an aging hippie in the East Village and had spent the last two days purifying it with rituals for all nine major deities.

For months he'd been increasingly unable to think of anything but his enemy, the one who called himself the Astronomer, who'd commanded a vast network of Egyptian Masons until Fortunato and the others had destroyed the nest he'd made at the Cloisters. The Astronomer had escaped, even if the evil thing he'd brought from space hadn't. The months of silence had only made Fortunato more and more afraid.

The Bornless Ritual, the Acrostics of Abramelin, the Spheres of the Qabalah, all of Western Magick had let him down. He had to use the Astronomer's own Magick against him. Had to find him, somehow, despite the blocks he'd set up that made him invisible to Fortunato.

The trick to Egyptian Magick-the real thing, not the Astronomer's warped and bloody version-was to go at it from their reverence for animals. Fortunato had spent his entire life in Manhattan, Harlem at first, then downtown once he could afford it. To him animals were poodles that left their shit on the sidewalk or listless, foul-smelling caricatures that slept their lives away at the zoo. He'd never liked or understood them.

It was an attitude he could no longer afford. He'd let Veronica bring her cat to the apartment, a vain, overweight gray tabby named Liz, in honor of the movie star. At the moment the cat was asleep on his crossed legs, her claws hooked into the silk of his robe. The cat's primitive value system was a doorway into the Egyptian universe.

He picked up the mirror. He just about had the mind-set. He watched his reflection: lean face, brown skin a little blotchy from lack of sleep, forehead swollen with rasa, the Tantric power of retained sperm. Slowly his features began to melt and run.

He heard a sound from the bathroom, a muffled sigh, and his concentration broke. And then, instead of the Astronomer, he was looking into the mirror and seeing Veronica. She sat on the toilet, her panties around her ankles. In her left hand was a pocket mirror, in her right a short piece of red-striped soda straw. Her head rolled loosely on her neck and she rubbed her cheek against her shoulder.

He put the Mirror of Hathor back on the mat. The junk didn't surprise him; it was just that she would do it here, right here in his apartment. He moved the protesting cat off his lap and went to the bathroom. He popped the lock with his mind and kicked the door open and Veronica's head jerked up guiltily. "Hey," she said.

"Pack your shit and get out," Fortunato said. "Hey, 's jus' a li'l coke, man."

"For Christ's sake, how stupid do you think I am? Do you think I don't know smack when I see it? How long you been on this shit'?"

She shrugged, dropped the mirror and straw into her open purse. She stood up, nearly tripped, then saw her feet tangled in her panties. She balanced herself on the towel rack while she pulled them up and snapped the purse closed. "Couple months," she said. "But I'm not on anything. I jus' do it sometimes. 'Sense me."

Fortunato let her by. "What the hell's the matter with you? Don't you care what you're doing to yourself?"

"Care? I'm a fucking hooker, why should I care?"

"You're not a hooker, goddammit, you're a geisha." He followed her into the bedroom. "You've got brains and class and-"

"Geisha my ass," she said, sitting heavily on the end of the bed. "I fuck men for money. That's the goddamn bottom line." She pushed her unresisting leg into her pantyhose, the big toenail laddering a run all the way down the right side. "You like to kid yourself with all this geisha shit, but real geishas don't fuck for money. You're a pimp and I'm a whore and that's all there is to it."

Before Fortunato could say anything somebody started hammering at the front door. Lines of tension and urgency radiated from the hallway, but nothing threatening. Nothing that couldn't wait.

"I don't put up with junkies," he said.

"You don't? Don't make me laugh. Half the girls in your stable take at least a snort now and then. Five or six are on the needle. Big time."

"Who? Is Caroline-"

"No, your precious Caroline is straight. Not that you'd know if she wasn't. You don't know what the fuck is going on."