The next morning, Cedric woke to the sound of screaming. That terrible sound came up through the floorboards and echoed through the house because it was Davian — Davian was screaming.

Cedric threw off his covers and went downstairs. The stairs that went from the third to the second story had a turn in them, and Cedric was in such a state of shock that he might not have laid down a single foot when he made the rotation to reach the floor where Davian slept. He passed one quiet room on the right to get to the next, the room where the Mage, when he would, did lie down his head.

Cedric put his hand on the doorknob and opened the door, and there inside was Davian, and he was tearing apart his bedroom.

The curtains of the four-poster were partially pulled down and the bedclothes were askew. Davian had put a moderate chest, normally kept on the rug, atop the far side of the bed, and he was rifling through the contents and repeating small words of panic to himself, “Where is it?” and, “where in God’s name did I put it?”

He had barely noticed anyone had entered the room because his head was still buried in his task and he muttered to the objects, “it couldn’t be…” and then he looked up at the boy, bearing wild eyes, and said strangely, “You?!” but then he mumbled and returned to rummaging behind the upturned lid and Cedric heard him mutter just audibly, “no, not him,” and then, “not him, couldn’t be him…”

Cedric knew the man was looking for the Dreamcatcher, and he thought about his own room and the nail that had sat alone for days, a week, perhaps, and though he was sure he had no hand in this, he couldn’t help feeling a pull to help the Mage out of his frenzy.

He looked above the Mage’s bed, at the same position where the post had been hung in his own room to serve as a ward. And then Cedric looked back to Davian.

“Wouldn’t you… have hung it up?” he asked.

Davian stopped then, and just looked plainly at Cedric. And the muscles in his face twisted a little, as if he were formulating a rebuttal, but then his face relaxed and went back to the way it had been.

“Yes…” he said. “You’re right; I would have hung the thing above…” and he looked first to the left, and then to his right and toward the window.

The Mage raised his hand, and when he did so, the dark blue curtain was roughly pushed aside and the light of day streamed anew into the room, and when it did that, some of the dust motes in the air were illuminated and Cedric saw them but looked away.

Davian stared at the window for a moment, arm still raised as the curtain settled into rest. And it was an odd gesture, as if he were frozen; frozen because a cruel conclusion was rising to his mind.

When he brought his hand down and toward his body, it was a slow, twitching motion as realization spread like ice and like fire all at once. He brought his hand into his short hair and grasped at it, pulling against the root in a gesture that made Cedric wince to see.

“They stole it…” he said, doling out his condemnation as tiny knives. “They stole it from me, the bastards; the savages!”

He was crazy, and he kept on screaming.

“The soothsayer and his little pet; they stole it from me!”

Cedric heard what he said and remembered the black bird, and the leg that had been bloodied, and how ever since that night, Davian had never stood up quite as straight as he had on the days before, and when Cedric looked at him sometimes, he noticed how he put his weight more on one side than he did on the other, but instead he just stuttered and asked meekly of the Mage, “W-who?”

Davian looked at him with vitriol and spat, “The Negress and her witch-doctor, who else?!”

Cedric sank as Davian continued raving.

“Frauds, phonies, Pharisees!” he chanted with increasing bile, eyes searching wildly. “Said they were friends; said they were friends of…” and he looked down again in disbelief and started rooting again through his trunk. “S-S-Shit, no, NO!”

“It has to be here!” he ranted. “It has to be!”

Cedric was afraid. Afraid because when Davian started talking like this, he knew the Mage had lost control. Afraid because yet again he could not trust in the walls of this house.

And still more afraid because he knew exactly who Davian was talking about.

“W-wouldn’t it make more sense to be… A-Adam?” Cedric posited uneasily. “He already—”

“Do you take me for the type to simply leave the back door open?” Davian said. “After I’ve already been bitten once?”

Cedric just bit his tongue and said nothing, because he knew what the words meant but—

“No, Cedric. I don’t allow such trespass,” he said, looking over his nose at the youth. “Not in my domain.”

Cedric just swallowed, and it was bitter, the way Davian looked at him with absolute disgust. And he didn’t have any way to console the Mage.

“They’re shifters, Cedric,” he said with a patronizing drawl. “Werewolves, for lack of a better term. Animals.”

Cedric was sweating, and utterly uncomfortable, standing in the entry of the bedroom.

“They change their form according to their whim. Birds, bats, bonobos — whatever crude imitation they think is good enough to fool the foolish. And no one set foot on the floor of this house.”

Cedric saw him then, eyes completely surrounded by white.

“They. Flew.”

Cedric brought his fingers together while they hung from hands useless at his sides, trying to find something, anything, to soothe and stop the twitching, and the fear, so he protested weakly, “Adam can fl—”

“It wasn’t Adam!” he screamed angrily. “Dammit Cedric!”

“I still have the Book,” Davian said, attempting to regain control through reason and evidence. “Only the two of them would have known I had the… But they—”

He looked at Cedric, whose heart had fallen into complete and utter helplessness and despair.

“They found… you.”

And then he snapped, because he looked right through the boy.

“What did you tell them?!”

Blood drained from Cedric’s face. “Nothing!” he said.

Davian sneered, one side of his face pushing up against a nostril. “So you did meet them. Or they met you. And they used you to get to me.”

“Where?” he demanded quickly. “Where was it? After one of your courses on underwater basket weaving?”

“I…”

“Dammit Cedric! What did you tell them?”

“Nothing!” he said again. “I didn’t say anything to them! They just asked…”

Cedric paused, remembering, and adding in a small voice, “…if I was healthy…”

“They don’t give a damn about your health, Cedric! All lies!”

Cedric looked up again as the Mage shouted at him.

“It was all an elaborate facade! They wanted you to get to me!”

“But I didn’t say anything about you!”

“All they had to do was follow your sweet little face here! And you didn’t have the wherewithal to look behind you once in a while!”

Cedric felt his eyebrows draw together in tension at the hateful remarks, but his mouth, albeit closed, hung slack in desperation.

“Maybe it wasn’t them,” Cedric insisted. “How could they get through your—”

“It’s your fault they found me; now we’re going to find them and take back what they owe me. They couldn’t be far, yet,” he said. “Not a second to waste.”

“And this time,” Davian added with menace, “I’ll make sure this never happens again.”

And Cedric, mind almost but not completely blank, remembered their faces. And though he could not see them, he thought, or tried to think, and closed his eyes to shut the world out for a moment. And after not much more than that moment, he opened his eyes to take in light while looking mournfully at the ground, and he said, “I don’t think it was them.”

Davian pushed air out of his face in a mirthless attempt at laughter.

“So you fancy yourself a bloody detective now?” he retorted scornfully. “Elementary, my dear Cedric?”

Cedric blinked and looked at him.

“You gave them the damn key!” Davian screamed. “You may not remember it — how very convenient for you — but you gave them the damn key!”

Cedric frowned, and he felt his face get heavy.

“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”

“Get out,” Davian replied. “Get out of my house.”

As Cedric walked on the sidewalks, he did not look up, but he knew it was threatening to rain. The sky was bright, but it was also grey, and every so often, the wind whipped through the chasms between the skyscrapers and it made his cheeks and neck cold but it did not penetrate his black leather jacket. And when he first started, he walked quickly, as if in escape, but after a while he slowed down because his calves hurt.

This used to be a habit of his, he reflected. And one of the first things he’d learned, something the city had taught him but never expected to learn, was how quickly one wore out shoes from walking through the streets. And that wouldn’t have been such a travesty if the weather had always remained fair, but invariably water, or worse, snow, would fall from above, and when that happened, the heat would leak from his socks through the holes he’d worn in the soles that scraped against the pavement step after countless step.

Cedric didn’t need a map anymore, and hadn’t needed a map for some time. He knew if he kept going uptown, the sequence would stop getting interrupted and the streets would proceed as the numbers promised but rarely delivered in the catty-corners downtown.

So he just kept going. And he kept going even as the rushing wind picked up and the sky began to do more than just spit and he shoved his naked hands in his pockets and wondered what he should do next. And eventually, he reached a place he didn’t know he was going, and not because he could feel a stone in his shoe, but because he heard the roar of faraway thunder, and his hair had become damp against his scalp, he knew it was time to stop.

And when he stopped, he was in Lincoln Center.

“One ticket for Pulp Fiction, please.”

“Sorry, that’s all sold out. Opening weekend. How about Forrest Gump? That’s supposed to be a—”

“No thanks. Saw it already. Watching Tom Hanks pretend to be a retard for two hours is not something I need to go through again.”

“Something funny then? Might I suggest Exit to Eden? I saw it and loved it. Supposed to be—”

“No, I don’t do Rosie. Nope. No thanks.”

“Hmm. Well there’s—”

“Quiz Show then. Whatever, I really don’t care. I just want to sit down. I’m tired.”

“Sorry, sir, it says that one’s sold out too.”

“The hell? Do you have anything left in the whole damn theater?”

“I’m sorry, sir; it’s raining. It’s always like this when it rains. Sometimes we sell every seat in the house.”

“Okay…” he said, trying to feign patience. “Can you just look at your listing and find me a movie, any movie I can see? I don’t really care at this point, I’ll wait; I just want a ticket to a movie. That’s why I came in here. I’m wet and I just—”

She looked at her computer screen. “Oh this one might suit you. It’s based on a King novel if I remember correctly, and it stars Morgan Freeman opposite—”

“Yeah yeah that’s fine, whatever; just give me a ticket. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck.”

Inside the theater, the room was dark. He found a seat in the back, and though the venue began to fill up, no one sat to either side of him and the seats were left in the upright position.

He watched the film for a while and the room smelled like popcorn. And sometimes there was a cough or two and someone turned to someone else and whispered a secret even though they were not supposed to be talking. But Cedric did not attempt to make them quiet. He just leaned back in his seat and watched the movie and he put his hands in his pockets and there was a ticket stub there and he felt the one side where it had been ripped and it had little nubs where the cardstock had been perforated.

And though it was strange, and though he’d never done it before, he drifted off to sleep in the cushioned chair despite the bright light, and despite the volume of the dialogue moving through the chamber.

“I guess I just miss my friend.”