When Arik Beltrán checks into a hotel on business, he expects the tedium of unfamiliar beds and boring meetings. He expects to meet a financial client and be home before the solitude of being a stranger in a mundane land becomes too much to bear. Instead Arik finds Blaze: a mysterious man with an inner fire that lives up to the name. Nothing in Arik's life, not his deranged father nor even his faint brushes with the magic only Arik can see in the woven web of life could have prepared Arik for the man in the hotel lobby who casually invites Arik to room 1109 for late night ... Well, anything at all. Blaze Zaituc, on the other hand, knows exactly who Arik is and what Arik needs: Blaze. He has crossed land and sea to find the man who has appeared in Blaze's Visions as the next target in the Quest that comprises Blaze's life. Arik is someone for whom the Universe has plans, and Blaze must make sure Arik complies. Or else. Unaware of the lives and risks hanging in the balance, Arik untangles himself from the sheets in the silent hours of the morning. He wonders if he will find the door to 1109 open and waiting. He's not a risk taker, but this one time, just this once, maybe he'll take a chance ... And seal both his and Blaze's destinies forever.

Vision Quest

There was nothing but silence punctuated by Arik’s breathing, and Blaze slumped, opening his eyes. The fire crackled, popped, and flung a tiny ember onto the rug near Blaze’s knee. Without thinking, Blaze picked it up. The glowing mote sat cradled in Blaze’s palm, and it winked as though it giggled.


And then Blaze was no longer in the goat man’s bedroom.


He was in a million homes in a million fires over a million years.


“Every fire that was still is,”said Blaze’s grandmamere, the voice fluttering the very fabric of the universe. “And every coal that burned is part of what you hold, and every ember that you touch knows its past and its present and something of its future.”


Chapter 67