Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

BACK AT CHETWYND-PITT’S chalet, floating in the tub, Nirvana’s Nevermind thumping through the walls, I smoke a joint among the steam serpents and peruse the Case of the Body-Hopping Mind for the thousandth time. The facts are deceptively simple: Six nights ago, outside my parents’ home, I encountered one mind in possession of someone else’s body.

TALKING HEADS’ Fear of Music

Last paragraph in the dying light: “ ‘And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love. Our weary eyes looking still, looking always,

“Oh, not those eyes”—now the woman removes her strange blue sunglasses. “I mean your special, invisible eye, just … here.” She rests her fingers on Aoife’s right temple and strokes her forehead with her thumb, and deep in my liver or somewhere I know something’s weird, something’s wrong, but it’s drowned out when Immaculée Constantin smiles up at

traipse

“On to the final page, now, Brigadier. ‘By all that’s wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself—or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here—you all had something out of life: money, love—whatever one gets on shore—and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives

“Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep.

Arkady says, “The Anchorites fuel their atemporality by feeding on souls, as Marinus said. But not just any old soul will do; only the souls of the Engifted can be decanted. Like organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match. Around every equinox and solstice, the soul’s owner has to be lured up the Way of Stones into the