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and excess ended in a drastically trimmed-down version that required a “special” buyer to appreciate.
    The house had three thousand square feet unevenly divided into one bedroom, one palatial bathroom, one kitchen, and one huge, vaulted room overlooking Leucadia’s flower farms, Interstate 5, and the Pacific Ocean. There was no office. No media room. No spa or sauna or exercise room. There wasn’t even a walk-in closet. None of the essential luxuries for the telecommuter of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. As a result, the house had stood empty as often as not.
    By the time Serena bought it, the house was approaching its half-century mark. The vaulted “great room” became her weaving studio. Five looms cast long shadows in the afternoon sun. Two of the looms were tall, one was medium height, one was small, and one was tiny enough to use sewing thread for the actual weaving. A tall loom stood empty but for the warp threads, ready for a new weaving to begin. The other big loom held a wall hanging that was almost finished. The pattern was a heraldic device that had been carried into the Second Crusade. Tear-shaped white Norman shields with simple red Christian crosses on them formed a huge patterned cross against a black background.
    Critically Serena looked at the hanging. It was a commission piece from a wealthy high-tech entrepreneur who was trying to feel some connection to his past—or at least the past he would like to have had. As with most commissions when the design was simply handed to her, she didn’t find the result particularly satisfying, but she wasn’t in a position to refuse a guaranteed paycheck. Especially one of this size.
    Though a few of her weavings were now on display in galleries in Manhattan, Milan, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, it might take years for any single piece to sell. In the meantime she still had to eat, make house and car payments, buy quantities of fine yarn, pay taxes, and find cat food that Mr. Picky wouldn’t turn up his black nose at.
    The only things Picky really liked were fresh Pacific lobster, tiger prawns, smoked salmon, and chicken pâté from the French deli at the beach. Since Serena didn’t have enough money to eat such things on a regular basis, she and Picky had to make do with tuna, cheese, and peanut butter. And rodents, of course.
    For the cat, not for Serena. She had never been tempted by any of the mice, voles, shrews, or moles Picky proudly laid out for her inspection every morning—particularly as the cat had already eaten the choice bits. It was his way of telling her what he thought of commercial cat food, canned tuna, cheese, and peanut butter.
    The cat in question yeowed loudly and stropped against the back of Serena’s knees with enough force to make her grab the heavy wooden pillar of the loom for balance. Picky was almost as big as a bobcat. He had wonderful orange eyes, sleek black fur, a bobbed tail, and a tuft of hair on the tip of each ear. Knee-high, muscular, predatory, he ruled the house with velvet paws and sheathed claws. Other than attacking salesmen, he had no faults worth mentioning, and certainly none worth the trouble of breaking.
    “If you’re hungry, go hunting.” Serena reached down and gave the cat a thorough rubbing. “If you’re thirsty, go terrorize the koi in the garden pond. If you want to go out, you know where the cat door is.”
    Picky rubbed his chin against the ancient woven cloth she wore around her neck.
    “You like it, too, don’t you?” Serena said, laughing. She hadn’t been able to let go of the scarf since the lawyer Morton Hingham had given it to her. She had even slept with it under her pillow.
    And her dreams had been both vivid and troubling: violet eyes like her own beseeching . . . something. The wild cry of a peregrine frustrated in its kill. The hell-deep baying of a staghound circling at the edge of a mist that kept retreating. Soon. Soon. He will see me and I will see him and