She might have been dead the way she stood so still. Dead and propped up against the door at the end of the narrow hallway.

Kasmira stepped up to the old woman and stopped. Ann and I waited a respectable distance away.

Thin, bony arms rested against her chest, folded. She wore a pale blue kaftan robe, roped at the waist with a white cotton cord. She stared at us with the same clear jet eyes as her granddaughter. Her hair was long for an old woman's. It hung in gentle grey waves down to the small of her mildly curved back.

"Well?" she croaked. She wasn't unpleasant to look at. She carried her years with pride and dignity. She simply looked old.

Ann stepped forward. "I'm Ann Perrine. We met once, a few years ago. I work for Bautista Corporation."

"And he?" she asked with a disdainful glance. The emphasis she put on my gender was as sharp as her athames.

"Dell Ammo," I said. "Ann tells me you can explain what's been going on outside. Did you get a look at it?"

Bridget smiled faintly. "I felt some static. Something screwed up a spell of mine, so I asked Kasmira to check things out. She went sensitive and saw what the others were seeing."

"Blood," Kasmira said softly.

"Yes," said Ann. "She told me that much. Can you track down the source for us?"

The old woman unfolded her arms and stood away from the doorframe. Picking up a cane from behind a wall hanging, she leaned forward to say, "That's hard work. Why should I do it?"

Ann stepped very close to the woman and whispered in her left ear. Bridget shook her head, pointing to her right. Ann changed sides and whispered again. Bridget frowned for a moment.

Her eyes widened. "Others have tried," she said. "And failed miserably."

Ann smiled at me. "None of them were professionals." She seemed to be enjoying all this.

The crone narrowed her gaze and peered at me as if I were a bad joke. "That has little bearing on why you wish me to unravel a psychic incident."

I continued to search for my cigarettes. "We're apparently the center of the occurrences. Perhaps the focus of a"-I had to clear my throat before saying it-"a psychic attack." I gave her the rundown on our mile-and-a-half excursion. She grilled me all through it with the incisiveness of a district attorney.

"The image on the building. It looked like a moosehead?"

"Yeah," I said, "sort of. Like a lousy drawing. The antlers drooped and the eyes were under them, off the sides of the head."

"The break in the clouds-was it round, square, oval?"

"A rip. A long slit, like a cat's eye." I watched her for a clue. Her face was impassive. "And then," I said, "we ducked into that apartment complex and everything stopped as long as we stayed inside."

She nodded and smiled. It was a cagey, smug sort of smile. "That has nothing to do with your problem. A pair of quite powerful witches once lived there. They stayed long enough to create a zone of safety. Many circles such as that exist. You don't see any blood drizzling in here, do you?"

"Can you determine the source?" Ann asked.

Bridget shifted her position and sighed. "That would require some effort to discover."

The customer bell rang. Kasmira stepped out front to handle it. Paying trade, after all, came first.

The old woman stood her ground. "You still haven't given me a reason I consider sufficient. It's not as though I can rattle off a quick prayer and an angel pops in with the answer by special delivery. Results vary according to the time and energy invested. You're asking quite a lot of an old woman." She stared at us, waiting.

I figured that she wanted her palm crossed with a little silver. I was wrong.

Ann's lips tightened to a thin line, then parted. Her voice took on an edge I hadn't heard before. In a low, cool tone she spoke, gazing at Bridget with a chilling gaze.

"The lady requires your assistance."

The old crone stared back for a long moment, a silent communication ping-ponging between them. In that time, the lines from decades of frowns appeared as deep furrows above her eyes, only to fade when she broke into a warm, assured smile.

A wrinkled hand tightened and loosened around the cane's grip. Bridget nodded for a moment. Her eyes closed lightly, then opened. She turned to reach for the doorknob behind her.

"In." She pointed toward the darkened room.

Ann stepped in. Bridget followed, snapped on a light. I brought up the rear, wondering what sort of mystic nonsense would happen next. Only I wasn't too sure that the word nonsense worked as well for me as it used to.

The room enclosed an area not much larger than the waiting room of my office. Dark, heavy curtains bordered three walls, including the one with the door. Bridget closed the door and drew the drape across it.The wall to the left was covered with a bookcase stuffed ceiling high with books-old and new-and rows of computer plaques, each hand-labeled with its contents. In front of the draped wall opposite the bookcase squatted what looked like a cluttered coffee table. It supported candles and wooden carvings of deer and crescent moons. The obligatory crystal ball sat in a bronze eagle's claw right next to a ceramic incense burner shaped like a dragon. Every so often, little puffs of smoke snorted from its nostrils.

The wall across from the door had a low, Japanese sort of table near it. Bridget sat down on her heels and beckoned us to follow.

Ann sat in the same fashion. I creaked down on my backside and folded my legs in front of me. The parquet floor hadn't been waxed in decades. It felt cold, but not chilly.

"I'll do this for you," the old woman said. "Just sit there and be quiet."

I finally found my pack of Camels-they had migrated into an inside coat pocket I'd forgotten existed on the newer styles. Before I'd even pulled one out of the package, Bridget eyed me.

"No smoking."

I nodded and returned the pack to its hiding place. It was a reasonable request.

A second later, she lit up enough incense to fumigate a flophouse.

Ann straightened up to take a deep breath of the stuff. She closed her eyes. The only indication that she'd been through any sort of ordeal was her kinked and tangled hair. The rest of her bespoke the outer calm of a resting feline.

Bridget slid a deck of cards from the table's edge to its center. Her fingers nimbly shuffled the deck.

I noticed that the cards were larger and thicker than the usual cards I'd played with. She mumbled to herself most of the time, her voice as soft as silk against satin. She began laying the cards out as if she were playing Solitaire.

I had some trouble figuring out the suits.

There were paintings of a man hanging by one leg, men and women with swords and cups, cards with fools, lovers, and buildings being struck by lightning. Each one seemed to have been drawn by a different artist.

I had no idea the Tarot fad had lasted this long.

She finished laying out the cards in a sloppy pattern. For a long time she just sat and stared at them. Her dark gaze flitted between scanning the cards and glancing at me and Ann. She said nothing.

"Well?" I asked after a few minutes. I was getting antsy.

She held up one hand and scooped up the cards with the other. Ann opened her eyes to look at me and smile, shaking her head a bit. She turned toward Bridget and closed her eyes again.

The old dame reshuffled the deck, murmuring in a low tone. I sighed and looked around the room.

The curtains-colored a rich, earthy hue of redwood soaked in burgundy-blocked almost all the noise from outside. The only sound in the room was the slide and slap of cards being redealt.

When she'd laid out the cards, only silence remained.

After a long wait, Ann cocked open one eye to look at Bridget. The old woman gazed from Ann to the cards, then back again to Ann. She appeared amply astonished.