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leaping up over those lights. She sees the red flames engulfing the city. She sees the skies black with flying demons and the screams of innocents; the screams of those who had known, had been absolutely sure, that such things could never happen. …
    She rubs her wrist-the mark there, the strange circular symbol that bums there. .. and she knows in her heart what it means. It means she’s been chosen. And she can’t let that happen. …
    So she makes up her mind. She steps off the roof. And she falls and she falls. .. and she hardly feels the impact as she crashes through the glass of an atrium sun roof, smashes down, slashed by broken glass, into the hydrotherapy room’s shallow pool. Water, swirled red with her blood, gushes up as if in protest. Her body bobs, faceup, oozing blood. Wounds fletched with broken glass like feathers from some inhuman being. Her eyes staring, dilated, looking into the infinitely deep well of death.
    Now she feels nothing. She’s simply falling through space to…
    Oh, no.
    --
    As Angela sat bolt upright in the recliner, screaming at the morning light that streamed through the window, the cat leapt yowling from her lap, startled.
    The nightmare was like a living thing in the room with her. Like that painting by Goya of the creatures looming over the bed-she could feel the nightmare’s hot breath on her neck.
    She got unsteadily up, realized she was sweating, shook the vision off.
    Just a dream. It wasn’t as if it’d really happened. The hospital. Ravenscar! Oh, Mother Mary don’t let it be. …
    --
    That same morning light. Another kind of nightmare. The waking kind.
    Constantine spat blood into the bathroom sink.
    And then a little more. And then a long hacking cough - and more blood came up and he spat that, too, and washed it down the sink with water. There goes my life, bit by bit, down the drain.
    He was pretty sure it was going to be a rough day.
    Because the morning sucked big-time. Today’s the first day of the end of your life. …
    He looked in the mirror and he knew the oncologist had been right.
    He shouldn’t be afraid of death. When he’d been a kid, troubled by visions, by seeing unseeable worlds, he did have one edge that other people didn’t have: He knew there was an afterlife. He knew it for sure. He’d seen it. Windows into that world opened to him all the time.
    Not just windows into the bad places, either.
    So things that scared other people didn’t scare him so much. Not then. Why be afraid of death when you didn’t really die? He’d been pretty sure he could manage to go to one of the better places after his death. It wasn’t all that hard. Just don’t screw up too badly. Give a damn and you won’t be damned.
    It hurt to remember the way his life was then. Being a kind of freak. His parents. The streets in those days.
    He learned to fight - in both worlds. Master your gift, a magician had told him, or your gift will destroy you.
    He’d sought mastery of the arts, black and white. His wasn’t the way of the ascetic; he was not much into self-denial. But he was strong and determined. He’d studied hard to learn to control the voices that taunted him, the unseen forces that roiled around him like a whirlwind; studied with low teachers, who took the money offerings he brought to get their fix before a lesson, and higher teachers, who looked at the anger in his soul with pity.
    And he read every book on the occult: on Fludd and Flammel, on Paracelsus and Plotinus; on the ancient initiates and on the Golden Dawn; on the Mysteries of Isis and Serapis and the secrets of the Theosophists. He’d learned Latin and Greek and Sanskrit so he could read the sources - and find the truth behind the legends. And he’d been careful.
    But then things had gotten worse in his life - and worse yet. And he’d made a terrible mistake, and…
    And now was not a good time to die. He hadn’t found a way out of what was going to happen to him after that.
    He coughed and spat