Hanna started. "I nearly forgot. My search didn't really turn up anything useful"-she turned to Kyle-"but yours did."

"Oh?" he said.

She shrugged. "I looked when I grabbed your datapad…"

"What did it find?"

"You got a couple of search requests indicating that Knight Errant and Ares were both willing to pay for information regarding something called 'aberrant spirits'."

"What does that mean?" asked Truman.

"Spirits they don't understand," said Seeks-the-Moon. "Or perhaps a type that contradicts what they believe they know about spirits."

"Aberrant spirits," echoed Kyle. 'That could be almost anything." He looked at Hanna. "Do you remember when it said Ares first started looking for that kind of data?"

Hanna closed her eyes and tilted her head, trying to recall. "Early February twenty fifty-one," she said after a moment. "About four years ago."

"It could be a coincidence," Truman pointed out.

"Yes, but too many coincidences aren't likely either," Kyle said. "Did the searches turn up anything on their findings?"

Hanna shook her head. "No, not directly, but you and I combined did get about two and a half gigapulses of data on the various subjects."

"Great. The answers could be somewhere among all that data, but we might never find it."

"I can set up a search program with a finer filter to run through the data we have. Index and cross-reference it. Then we can just scan the topic list," Hanna offered.

"Do that," Kyle said, then turned to Truman. "In the meantime, I'd like to-"

Somewhere, deep inside of him, the echo of a part of his being that had been sent elsewhere twisted. He felt it burn, and then an instant later, dissolve as potential unexpectedly freed returned to him.

He gasped.

Seeks-the-Moon was suddenly alongside him. "What is it?"

Concern also showed on the faces of both Hanna Uljaken and Dan Truman.

"One of the elementals I left guarding Mitch has been destroyed," Kyle said. He turned to look out across the city in the direction of the Handlemann Institute. "And that means the hospital is under attack."

Dan Truman turned white. "Oh my god…"

"I've got to get over there," Kyle told Seeks-the-Moon, who nodded but seemed surprised. "Charlotte!" Kyle called, and the air elemental appeared alongside him.

"Help her," he told the spirit, pointing at Hanna. "Gather the rest of the Truman family inside. Then do anything and everything Seeks-the-Moon tells you."

If air spirits could scowl, Charlotte did so, but all she said was, "I will do as you say."

"You'll need my help at the hospital," said Seeks-the-Moon.

"No, it could be a trick," Kyle said, quickly sitting down in one of the pool chairs. "Excuse me. I need to get over there."

Working as fast as he could, Kyle turned his perception inward and allowed his spirit freedom from its physical body. He separated, then looked over the quiet area of astral space around the pool, the mundanes Dan Truman and Hanna Uljaken, though she still wore her scintillating earring, and the spirits Seeks-the-Moon and Charlotte. The mundanes stared at his body while the two spirits watched where Kyle floated a meter or so above the ground. Only Hanna seemed to catch on that Seeks-the-Moon was looking somewhere else than she was.

Kyle nodded at the spirits, turned, and shot outward over the city. The Handlemann Institute was not far, about twenty blocks north of the Truman Tower. He was there even before his physical body had collapsed fully in the chair.

A sense of despair filled him as he entered the hospital-emotional overflow from the sick and the dying. But there was something else he could feel as he dropped quickly through the man-made floors, taking as straight a path toward Mitchell Truman's room as he could. There was pain, active and sharp, echoing upward at him, and some odd metaphysical aroma, pungent, cold, and alien.

He dropped into the Truman boy's room, and almost leaped out again in revulsion. The room was splattered in blood and gore, the bed torn and twisted, slammed against one wall. But Mitchell Truman was not in it. The blood, Kyle saw, came from the bodies of a disemboweled guard-Knight Errant by the tattered shards of his uniform-and what seemed to be only the torso of a small woman in a doctor's coat Parts of her were lodged between the blinds on the window.

Kyle cursed, and felt another twinge-his other elemental. Its cry came from below him again, deeper in the bowels of the building. He willed himself down toward it, and felt the reverberations of a powerful spell echo through astral space. He homed in on it.

He emerged in a corridor as the final wisps of unleashed mystic energy washed through it, illuminating it in shifting astral colors of green and blue. There were four beings present. Two of them human and two of them spirits.

The two humans were probably from Knight Errant, but from astral space Kyle could not read the markings or colors of their uniforms. Their clothing was a simple, non-living dull gray. One, however, was a mage, and his aura sparkled with the residual energy of the powerful spell he'd just tossed at one of the spirits. The mage stumbled backward, pained by the force of that spell, while his companion, by his size and form apparently an ork, opened fire on the larger of the two spirits with his assault rifle.

The dark spirit, twice man-sized, barely noticed as the rounds of gunfire passed through its shadowy body and tore up the wall behind it

Kyle stared, unable to suppress a gasp. The thing before him was huge, with six sharp legs and a long, flattened body of a shiny leathery brown. A terrible scent, horribly pungent and one that could only be described as an odor, reached Kyle in astral space. The spirit lashed out with one of those legs, a smaller front one, and caught the mage across the upper part of his right arm. Blood jutted from the wound, spraying the other guard and the spirit.

The second spirit, Kyle's elemental, sputtered near the floor, dim and weakened from an obvious clash with this many-legged thing. Oblivious to Kyle's arrival, the dark spirit moved in on the collapsing mage.

Kyle acted quickly, thinking to attack the spirit while it was distracted. His choices were simple-attack it directly with the raw energy of his own form or through a spell. Both were dangerous.

He enacted the spell, pulling the energies of astral space together with blinding speed. The spirit looked up at him, though its form seemed to have no true eyes. Kyle had no doubt it could sense him quite clearly. It began to hiss.

The energy flowed, violet, white, and blue, into him as the final pieces of the spell came together in his mind, and the spirit leaped, spreading its short, apparently vestigial wings, as he released the spell.

The spell caught the spirit square on, a bolt of astral power that impacted against the creature's head and splashed backward along nearly the whole length of its dark, shiny body. It squealed, the sound of its cry alien and painful in astral space, then seemed to shake its form as though to trying throw off the remaining energies of the spell tearing at it As it thrashed, its legs flashed about, ripping tears in the walls and threatening to dismember the others in the hall. Its long feelers slapped against Kyle.

He reeled. The pain from casting the powerful spell in astral space, raw and unanchored to the physical world, was tremendous. He was also nearly suffocated by a putrid, nearly overpowering odor. He fought off the red mist that filled his mind as the spirit steadied itself. Tendrils of astral smoke rose from its hideous form as it leaped at him again. Kyle barely had time to react. As an FBI man he'd learned quick and dirty hand-to-hand combat from a UCAS Marine Corps specialist, and that training came back to him now. He turned his body aside violently as the spirit shot forward. The lead claws missed, and then Kyle was inside them, close to the spirit's head. Grappling at the thing for leverage with his left hand, he focused as much raw energy as possible into his right as he brought it up under what he thought was the spirit's head.