11:24 A.M.
Brunch had been served to Lincoln Grayle and Eden Waring's doppelganger on the terrace of the second of three traylike levels of the magician's mountain home, designed, apparently, by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed of native sandstone with a plentiful use of bronze-toned glass. While Tom Sherard and Courtney Shyla watched from the high-country hide that Courtney had selected on her first foray, Gwen previously had gone inside to put on clothes. And returned of her own volition. Tom noted this with interest and apprehension. After returning she had listened, saying little or nothing, to a pitch from Lincoln Grayle that went on for nearly a quarter of an hour, Grayle pacing around the terrace while Gwen remained seated, motionless, her head bowed, hands knotted in her lap. She looked tensely servile, Tom thought, sharing with Courtney binoculars that would not reflect sunlight. They were about three hundred yards from the house, in a jumble of sheared boulders below a southwest face of the mountain, scrub spruce that clung to deep cracks between the rocks providing good cover for their surveillance.
"What do you think he wants from her?" Courtney commented when Gwen and the magician devoted themselves to their meal. Gwen ate tentatively at first, but after a few bites of beef Wellington her appetite perked up. Food seemed also to loosen her tongue. Her end of the conversation was accompanied by mostly negative gestures. Sherard was glad to see that; he had thought she might have been mesmerized by the Trickster. The only other way to account for Gwen's continued presence on the terrace would have been black light; but obviously she wasn't a prisoner of high-quantum energies. So Grayle had come up with another means of keeping Gwen close to him. And he wanted her cooperation. Leoncaro, Tom thought, might have been right when he theorized Grayle needed the dpg to retrieve the missing half of his black soul.
"Maybe I can answer that," he said to Courtney. "But first you should know that Gwen is not exactly what she appears to be."
"Here we go again," Courtney said, rolling her eyes in mock resignation.