Bagabond wondered if Paul liked cats. He had better.

"Okay, how did you track me to Jetboy's Tomb?" Brennan shrugged. Jennifer was carrying the book sack and he had two bags full of Chinese food that Jennifer had insisted on buying at a take-out place near her apartment.

"It was easy. I'd put a bug on the cloak I'd given you. That little fellow with Fatman teleported me to the middle of the Holland Tunnel, which, luckily enough, isn't far from Jetboy's Tomb. Though I must say I was worried that you'd do something foolish before I managed to reach you. And I was right."

"Humph. And then?"

"And then? Wyrm had planted lookouts to make sure they wouldn't be bothered while they were recovering the books. You must have come through while they were either still secur ing the perimeter or rousting someone else. At any rate, I took the place of one of them just as Wyrm and the others were dragging your unconscious body out of the tomb. Then it was simply a matter of waiting for my chance. I saw it, and jumped Wyrm."

"What did you do to him, anyway?"

Brennan held up his hand. The palm was still stained brown.

"Remember the mustard I brought from the street vendor?" She did. "Wyrm s tongue is an extremely sensitive sensory organ that doesn't take too well to spices. Besides dis comforting him, I'm sure the mustard also wiped away all traces of your scent. So you should be safe from him."

"Thanks. And thanks for saving my life."

"You did the same for me. I'd have never gotten that gun away from Kien."

Jennifer nodded. She'd never used her power that way before, and, even though it had been unintentional and Kien had, after all, tried to kill her, now that she had time to think about it, she felt nauseated. All that blood…

They walked on in silence for a while. She felt Brennan's eyes on her, but said nothing until they'd gone up the four flights of stairs to her apartment.

"Well, here we are."

Books were everywhere about the living room, giving it a comfortable, lived-in look. At least that's how Jennifer thought of it. Brennan put the bags containing the food on the counter that divided the kitchen nook from the rest of the room.

"Make yourself at home," she said as she turned to put the coffeepot on the stove and got two plates and utensils from the cupboard. She turned back to see Brennan standing in the middle of the apartment, an impatient expression on his face. "You want to see the book?"

He nodded. She took the bag off her shoulder and put it on the counter next to the food. She selected a box, ladled a portion of shrimp fried rice onto her plate, and reached for the box with the sweet-and-sour chicken.

"Well, go ahead."

If Brennan noticed the resignation in her voice he gave no sign. He strode forward eagerly, took the pouch, and looked inside. Jennifer kept her eyes on the food. She took a forkful of the chicken and somehow it didn't taste as good as she had thought it would.

"Is this a joke?" Brennan asked after a moment, his voice flat and emotionless.

He was holding up Kien's diary.

Jennifer swallowed. "No, no, I don't think so," she said in a small voice.

He thumbed through it, disbelief on his face.

"It's blank," he said, fanning the pages for Jennifer to see. "I know." She put her fork down and looked at Brennan for the first time.

"What the hell happened?" Brennan demanded, anger growing in his voice. She could see his jaw muscles jump as he clenched his jaw tighter and tighter.

"Well, the nearest I can figure is that the ink didn't translate when I ghosted the book. You see, it takes special effort to make dense material like lead, or gold, insubstantial, and he must have used something like that to write… with… you see…"

Her voice ran down as the storm gathered on Brennan's face.

"I. Went. Through. All that shit. For. A. Blank. Book." He said each word as if it were a sentence.

"I couldn't tell you," Jennifer said. "At first I didn't totally trust you. Then, when I saw how important it was to you, I just couldn't find a way."

Brennan stared at her silently, and she flinched, expecting him to scream, to throw the book, to strike at her, to do just about anything but what he did.

"A blank book," he repeated. The storm on his face broke and vanished as quickly as it had gathered. He sank down unseeingly into the large stufled chair near the bookcase, rose up slightly and picked up the hardcover copy of Scaramouche that was open, face down on the chair. He looked at it as if he'd never seen a book before and muttered, "Ishida, my roshi, if you could only have experienced the events of this day. What lessons could be learned. Tell me." He looked at Jennifer with serious, questioning eyes. "What lessons can one learn from a blank book?"

"I-I don't know," she faltered.

He shrugged. "I don't know either, yet. A new koan to meditate upon." Brennan thumbed through the diary again, a bemused expression on his face. "Of course," he said after a moment, "Kiev doesn't know the book is blank. Doesn't know that at all."

He smiled, the first real smile that Jennifer had ever seen on his face. He looked at Jennifer and his smile broadened, turned into laughter. It was joyful, cleansing laughter. Jennifer sensed he hadn't laughed out loud in a long time. She felt herself smiling as well out of relief and because of the recognizable, binding companionship that already lay between them.

Brennan stood, still laughing and shaking his head. He walked over to the counter. His eyes and Jennifer's were on the same level. If anything, he had to look up to see into hers.

She'd never seen him before with a true smile on his face, and she liked it. He told her, without saying anything, that he liked what he saw when he looked into hers.

He took his hood off and dropped it on the counter. Some of the tension had gone out of his face and he looked years younger than when Jennifer had first seen him.

"Did you get any egg rolls?" he asked.

She looked down at the little boxes filled with Chinese food, and felt a strange, unexpected, unanalyzable stab of joy.

When Jack finally managed to find Freakers, he understood why it wasn't the kind of all-night dive that advertised itself strenuously. Those who needed to know where it was, found out. Looking at the moving neon woman astraddle the door, Jack thought that maybe some people arrived here simply by following their darkest instincts.

The neon seared his retinas like a branding iron. This hour of the early morning, there was no one guarding the door. Presumably this was the time of day when only the most dedicated clientele showed up.

Ignoring the swooping, glowing lines above him, Jack pushed open the door and entered. Smoke, muted conversational noise, geometric patterns in neon primariesthese were what he noticed first.

Across the main room, an obviously tired stripper desultorily went through the motions on a cylindrical revolving stage. Bathed in a rose spotlight, she undulated to a slow beat Jack couldn't even hear. He squinted, trying to focus in the smoke. He realized the strippers abdomen was covered with what looked like pairs of vertical lips. She was down to her last Gstring.

Jack turned away, scanned the tables. He headed toward the cheap, plank-hewn bar. Then he saw the row of booths at the back. There was a girl in one of them-a young woman with black hair falling straight along the sides of her thin face. She was dressed in a startling, clingy blue dress. She stared directly at him.

There was a nondescript man in a brown suit standing over the booth, talking to the young woman. He straightened as Jack approached. Jack faltered, then walked up to them. Ignoring the man in brown, Jack looked down at the woman. She started to smile.

"Uncle Jack?" The malachite eye in the silver alligator hanging from her left earlobe flashed as it caught light from the follow-spot clicking off on the stage.