Twi lay hidden among the honeysuckle vines, ignoring the mosquitoes and the gravel digging into her sweaty skin as she watched the dark bulk of the freight train creep backward. So many times, she and the other pickers had lain hiding like this, ready to swarm a car and throw down sacks and satchels of rice or coal for the little ones to collect. Tonight the little ones had been left to home.

Tonight she wore a picker's britches for the last time, and her carpetbag satchel was already full. She'd packed corn bread, a double handful of field peas, two corked jugs of water, her shoes, two dresses with underthings, a flour-sack towel, soap, a comb, a threaded needle, nearly seventeen dollars, a shiv, and a traced map showing how to get from the Harlem train station to a YWCA that accepted colored girls.

Alabama would never see this Twilight again. Not if she could help it.

She'd let the first train pass on after seeing the Pinkerton man pacing in the moonlight, swinging his club. Being as she could see him, likely he could see her. Those men delighted in guarding the trains from pickers, hoboes, adventurous boys, and anybody as desperate as Twilight Amery.

So she'd waited, breathing honeysuckle and the creosote off the railroad ties, letting the mosquitoes feed on her. She'd waited knowing the second train would come by as the moon was setting behind the mountains over toward Birmingham. She wouldn't need cloud shadow to catch a ride on that one.

But the second train had come way early. The moon, still high, ducked in and out from behind ragged clouds.

The wind blew strong way up there. Down here, wasn't a breath to cool her skin. Sweat stung her eyes. She had nothing to wipe them with but her shirt or the rag-rope she'd braided to make a shoulder strap for her satchel. Both were black with coal dust.

She blinked and set her mind to endure the wait, mosquitoes and sweat and all. At this time of summer folks slept on their porches, or tried. Just too hot to sleep good anywhere. But it was also too hot to stay completely awake. And thatwould give her the best chance she would ever have to sneak onto the northbound train.

To her right, Timmy, Hooter, and Harelip Joe muttered together, waiting to see if she made the train on her own. If the Pinkerton man reacted to her, the boys had promised to jump the train, make noise, and let themselves be chased away. If she couldn't trust them, she couldn't trust anyone.

If they failed, she'd have to hope the Pinkerton would kill her, not leave her crippled up like Timmy's oldest brother.

It was bad enough to be some white man's bastard in Alabama. If crippled too, she'd have to get to a track somehow and lay herself down in front of the next train. Jesus would understand.

The whistle blew two long hoots, the "leaving now" signal. To the front of the train, cars paused, and one by one clanged and groaned before changing direction.

Twilight pressed her lips together, inwardly snarling at the bright moonlight. The Pinkertons had to know this junction was a favorite for pickers and hoboes alike, so they'd be watching.

This was the last train before dawn. Time was up.

The boys were talking about going home. They had homes to go to.

As of midnight, the bank owned the Amery house. A mortgage of some kind had come due. Her suspicions as to who'd signed the paper and got the money made no nevermind. She was free of it all.

If she had to walk to Pell City, or even Birmingham, she'd find a train headed to New York City, where there was still plenty of jobs. To Harlem, where a singer could get rich. To the Apollo Theater, the Lafayette, the Savoy, or the one on the radio, the Cotton Club.

The cars clanked by faster, already moving at a dog-trot speed. Under the clanging metal racket of wheel and coupling, the mosquitoes whined on, one tickling her eyelid. She batted it away.

Tonight everything had seemed so right. Everything. Until this train had decided to pull in so early.

She rested her forehead on her fists-and the moon went to shadow.

She looked up. The nearest car was a hopper. Looked like the one behind it was too. Not boxcars, but each car would have a ladder on both ends. If she waited for a boxcar, she might lose this last little chance.

Besides, Old Pinkie Pinkerton would be watching the boxcars.

She pulled her feet and hind end under her like a cat a-fixing to jump, digging with her toes for solid ground under the loose gravel, and adjusted her satchel rope.

Here came the dark slit between cars-Now!

She sprang.

"I want my clothes, Turn. Where are they?"

He watched me over the rim of his cup. "Safe. I'll bring them to you later."

My temper sizzled. "Where are my clothes?" Where are my wallet and phone?

"In the car."

I swung out of the bed and strode to the door. The door opened on a stretch of saltmarsh cordgrass, Spartina alterniflora, and a pier leading out into a stagnant-smelling body of water.  At least it was high tide, and a cold morning.  Low tide in the summer smells of rotting crabs, rotting algae, and rotting eggs. 

Chills ran up my legs and dug in with claws. From the left of the cabin, an oystershell drive curved to skirt a hogwire fence.  On the other side of it, needlerush and saltwort marked slightly higher ground, and in the distance a rise topped with scraggly bushes that might have been trees anywhere else.  Past that, the sun glinted on more water. 

To the right of the cabin I saw another cabin, more marsh grass, more water.  No car, no boat, no sign the other cabin was inhabited.

I saw no car anywhere.  Unless it was behind the cabin?  I went inside, and pushed the door shut against the cold wind. 

Turn hadn't moved. "You have to stay here for a few days, KT." He spoke patiently, like my former shrink did when he thought I needed to let my parents take control of a few more of the things they'd decided I couldn't control. 

Inhale two three four five six seven eight nine ten.  I could act calm, whether I felt calm or not.

He took another sip.  "I don't want to be unpleasant about this, but you can't be allowed to run off on your own and mess things up."

Allowed? By whom? My stomach heaved.

I locked my throat.  You can do it if you have to.

If, for example, you are a non-predator isolated by a predator. If you have only the predator's say-so that your ex-lover has been found dead.  And that the predator didn't cause the death.

Something moved in his pale Turner eyes. I'd stared too long. He sipped his coffee.  "If you're thinking of knocking my head in and taking my clothes, KT, don't try it.  You don't know where the car is."

Like that was the biggest obstacle. If I had clothes, and shoes, I could walk. If I took his clothes, I'd take his wallet too. As Father's minion, he would have substantially more cash than I normally carried.  Cash uncomplicates most predicaments.  Certainly, my life had become rife with small predicaments since I'd stopped going by the bank where Mother deposited my allowance.

MORE THAN MEMORIES Excerpt

Harry's touch showed itself everywhere in the museum: meticulously placed arrangements in the double-S-curves he favored; an emphasis on artistically rendered practical objects instead of pieces of art; painted room dividers showing each object in use. He apparently had quite some influence with whoever controlled acquisitions here.

And, thanks in part to me, he knew what to seek out.

Call it life or call it magic, Harry knew to collect the objects made of the five stones that can carry it: jet, which whispers in the ether; petrified wood, which groans; humming pearl; purring amber; and moaning opal, which is made of nothing once-living, but which nonetheless holds its own among the living.

I found the strongest current and followed it to an opal that moaned so loudly even the living might hear it.

The Russkies say an opal carries the evil eye. The truth is worse. Every flicker you see? That's not molecular water trapped between layers of crystal. It's memories. Memories given in worship, memories purged from a soul overburdened with them, memories someone might not have known he was giving up.

And every memory carries a scrap of a soul.

Opals are brittle. Drop one, it chips. Heat one, it cracks. If you feed it too many memories - too much life - it shatters.

When an opal shatters, it releases its store of memories. If not collected by the living, they fade. Lost forever. Dead.

If the rare living opal shatters, the memories bursting out of it carry rich stores of life along with those fragments of soul. Life seeks a way to live on. If a sufficient quantity of unanchored life finds an emptied body, the body rises.

The risen body hungers for more life than it has, and instinct drives it to feed on the life and the blood of the truly living.

Remember Dresden? Every opal in that doomed city shattered during the firestorm, each releasing its life into the maelstrom. If Himmler's magicians had succeeded in controlling the vampires that rose three nights later, the Russkies would never have reached Berlin.

The more ruthless of the unliving can maintain themselves, and even grow stronger, over the course of centuries. But they are never satisfied - never know respite from hunger - because however much they consume, they cannot fully achieve true life. And, having once been living, they feel the difference.

Yeah, I feed on the living - their memories,  not their blood. I've also been accused of having no conscience. I have regrets, though, and a soul is what feels the weight of regret.

And anyway, we were talking about opals.

The Eastern Orthodox could seal a paladin's soul in living opal, then send out his body on unspeakable missions. Without his soul, the paladin never questioned orders, never heeded pain, never knew fear. He withstood tremendous damage without faltering, and he wrought dark miracles.

Something that strong had taken Harry's soul. Of all the vital forces in the Powers Museum, only this opal had such power.

He was so empty that if I wanted, I could have occupied his shell as my own, adopted his remaining memories as my own, lived out his human lifespan for him. Maybe be given another chance when the door opened at the other end.

But this was Harry. If I had any chance of saving him, I had to take it.

I had dawdled long enough. I condensed enough to see light as the living did, and to read the card on the display case. The card called the treasure a 430-carat black opal. Roughly testicle-sized, though the card didn't say so. N-2, meaning charcoal black.

A diamond that size would have to be completely clear and near flawless to be worth more.

Gemstone memories flooded through me: weights, shapes, hues, and entrancing imperfections. I tasted carob, the locust of the prophet, and heard my father telling me a carob seed is the carat by which a gemstone is measured. A perfectly graduated strand of creamy Tahitian pearls flowed sensuously between my burn-scarred fingers -

No! I'd never had hands like that, burns like those. The stones weren't my memory at all. Whose?

The question taunted me. I dissected the memory, tried to trace its connections, but it connected only to other gem lore, other stone-related memories. I had to have stolen those memories when starving, as I had been when finally released from the electric cage in Las Vegas, but how could I have taken so many without any idea who I'd taken them from?

Was I becoming a patchwork quilt of memories, nothing more?

I prided myself on having a soul - being a soul. Can a soul live as a random accumulation of other people's memories? Or would a moaning opal like this one swallow me whole, imprison me until it shattered and sent my orphan memories to animate some hungry corpse?

I circled the display reluctantly. I'd never heard one moan so, as eloquent and indecipherable as the muezzins' undulating calls from the spires of Cairo, the first time I'd heard them.

Finally I forced myself to lift enough to see the stone itself.

The opal shimmered, cut as a man's face with eyes closed, brow furrowed, mouth open, lips thinned and twisted in agony. Or rapture. Hard to tell with some guys.

This red-lit monstrosity's moan pulsed in me, throbbed with an aching blue-balled intensity that said it was right at the point of explosion. I pulled further back, because that pulsing energy needed just that one additional measure of memory, one oiled fist-stroke, and then its orgasm would loose enough life to blow this building apart.

The moan changed. Dick...please ...

Harry's voice.

BAREBACK Excerpt

Spinning on his heel, he ran. Through the hammering rain. Down the street.

A car screeched its tires behind him. Chasing me with a car?

He ducked into the nearest alley, dodging two hollow TVs, a beanbag chair, half a toilet, and other piles of junk left and right. In front of him, his doubled shadow leaped and danced like a crazed cartoon. Behind him, the car kept coming. Not fast, but --

Street! The busier one! Crowds are your safe places, Jinx.

But the people had vanished in the pouring rain. He raced down the sidewalk, barely able to see ten feet in front of him. Past the cross street, he found a kill zone of a parking lot on each of the three blocks facing. Fucking A!

He doubled back, and a man lunged for him. He dodged like a quarterback, letting the guy hit the wet sidewalk. Brian aimed a throat-stomp as he passed, but the guy rotated from under his foot.

Adrenaline surged through his system -- a glory too close to the thrill of feeding. Meaning he would have to feed tonight, one way or another.

Another guy knocked him against a cement planter stinking of cigarette butts.

He tucked and rolled, ready to hit the ground running. Except his left foot stayed behind, hooked in a tenacious hand.

The sidewalk bashed into his face. Pain-stars peppered his vision.

He kicked hard with his right foot, planting his heel in the grabber's nose. Blood sprayed to his shin.

Another man leaned over him, a shadow in his smeared vision, and light caught the edge of a rain-slicked blade arcing in. Before the blade reached him, Brian put a fist under the man's chin.  Tiny throat-bones crunched against his knuckles.

Fucking A -- I've killed him.

In the back of his head, his brothers' voices laughed harshly. Think later, Jinx.

Again he rolled, wet grit grinding into his skin. His shirt ripped in someone's grasp. He skinned out of the clinging cloth, saw a narrow opening that might be an alley, and ran for all he was worth.

BACKTRACK Excerpt (set in 1984)

Fort stretched out on the weather-roughened planks of the matriarch's pier, watching the phosphorescent leading edges of the waves coming in. Even with no moon, the sky glowed with Tampa's everlasting city-aura, and the waves reflected it. The punklets, his youngest pair of brothers, snored lightly at his feet.

The sun would be up soon, stopping the boys' sneak-and-stalk exercises. They'd barely have time to shower and change before starting the school-week: five straight days of pretending to be completely human.

He caught scent of a male, rank with day-old sweat. The snoring twins were too young to produce that odor. So, a pair of the teens has picked me as prey?

He grinned at the swells rolling under the pier. Trying to sneak up on him took balls, if nothing else.

In the past six years--no, seven years, since right before Dad had taken up with the punklets' mother--only Cassio had succeeded. And Cassio's reward had been surgery to put his arm back together, followed by the six weeks of physical therapy he'd just completed. Not that it had put a dent in his his smart-ass attitude.

This pair was good. They used the rhythm of the waves to cover their footfalls and their breathing. But their assumption their prey would pay attention to only sight and sound was pure arrogance, which could get them killed.

He spoke toward the waves. "At this time of night, the wind comes off the land toward the water. Never expect your quarry to be nose-deaf."

A moment passed. Then one of the stalkers sighed. "Shit. I thought we had you."

Russ and Jimmy. Of course. His cousins were sixteen, six years his junior, and increasingly prone to challenge his authority .

He rolled over as the teens settled in lotus positions beside the sleeping little ones.

Russ, identifiable by his mullet haircut, mashed a mosquito on his cheek. "Even if you smelled someone, how could you tell it wasn't them two?"

Jimmy nodded, his dandelion-puff hair bobbing. "We all smell of bugspray."

The punklets stirred. One mumbled, a note of distress. His twin, still deep asleep, put a hand on his arm in an automatic comforting gesture. They settled together. They had long hair like kids on TV. Or, rather, like Russ and Jimmy, the cool rebels of the family.

Little kids could afford hair long enough to get grabbed in a fight. Most of the twins, like Fort himself, kept it short. Jimmy and Russ always had to be different. If I'd known it was you two coming up on me, I'd have grabbed you by the hair and slung you into the water. Two lessons for the price of one.