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beautiful set of Japanese knives, a gift from Cassandra for his eighteenth birthday. The same skills that made him a good osteomancer made him a good cook, and when he thought of a life away from Los Angeles, he pictured himself in chef whites, in the kitchen of his own restaurant. But the cookware seldom made it out of the boxes.
    The TV was an old twenty-two-inch set, left behind by a previous tenant, and between the rabbit ears was perched the apartment’s only personal touch, an empty picture frame. Long ago, it had held a picture of him and his mother. But Otis urged him to get rid of it. It was too dangerous to keep a piece of evidence clearly linking him to his parents. So, at the age of fifteen, Daniel had torn it up and held it over a gas burner and watched the pieces blacken and curl. He remembered a sense of icy satisfaction as the flames overtook the smiling faces, as if they could obliterate the memory of a mother who’d fled to the north when her son was hunted, who’d never come back for him, who’d never even sent word. Now, years later, Daniel understood it was more complicated than that. Now, when he looked at the empty frame, he tried to remember his mother’s face without the flames. But the flames never really went away. They were more real than any memory the photo captured.
    The knocking on his door was as light and persistent as the beating of a moth’s wings. Daniel crept to the one window in the living room, overlooking a courtyard of jacaranda petals, and beyond that, the black ribbon of Slauson Canal. He spotted no cop boats, heard no helicopters in the sodium-orange sky. He tugged his jeans up over his skinny hips and went to the door. A dreadful face looked back at him through the peephole, gray and smudged as a kneaded gum eraser.
    He opened his door.
    The wraith was a boy of ten or eleven, with underfed arms sticking out from a billowing men’s undershirt. His hair was a colorless tangle, his sockless feet swimming in battered sneakers. His birdlike eyes darted in deep hollows.
    “Pier Four, Broadway Canal, Chinatown,” said the boy, the night air turning his arms to goose skin. He passed on a few instructions, then turned and walked back down the cement steps to the courtyard.
    Daniel fumbled for a moment, thinking he should give him something to eat or a jacket or a pair of socks, but he knew the boy wouldn’t eat anything offered, and any clothes would be quickly shed and abandoned. He was a wraith and would only accept what his keeper gave him. He could go only where his keeper told him to, and could say nothing except what his keeper told him to say. And if he were followed, he would drown himself in a canal before bringing unwelcome visitors home. That’s what made wraiths useful messengers, and that’s why Otis kept them.
    Daniel locked his door and turned on the TV and watched infomercials until the sun came up. Today, he’d be meeting Otis’s inside man.
    *   *   *
    He cut a path through the scents of ginger and deep-fry grease and spotted a tall white woman leaning against a concrete fu dog. Late forties, her chestnut hair streaked with silver, she struck a smart figure in a camel-hair coat and a red scarf. Daniel stopped in front of her and stared openly until she looked up. She held an unlit cigarillo tucked between two slender fingers. He smelled tobacco and vanilla.
    “Got a light?” she asked. Her accent reminded Daniel of the posh BBC programs his mom would sometimes pull down on the shortwave radio at night.
    “I don’t smoke,” said Daniel.
    Her eyes crinkled with amusement. “That wasn’t the signal.”
    “I know. I’m not much into cloak and dagger.”
    “Spoil my fun, then.” The cigarillo went into her pocket. “Let’s get some tea.”
    She had a favorite place a few blocks away, and they sat at a banquette of pink vinyl repaired with duct tape. Daniel was dubious until he tasted the Oolong. It was a rare delicacy in Los Angeles these days,