They did not meet often. He never told Joyce about any of it, explaining away his cuts as minor workplace or kitchen injuries. He and Sean had no relationship other than their private rituals in the clearing. He was led to continue by his own curiosity; the visions seemed harmless enough and he'd been enchanted by the glimpses of his own future. He carried himself with the easy confidence of a man who knew everything would turn out just fine, because he had seen it happen.

Each time, William saw new things, increasingly other people's lives, which he related to Sean. Each time, he also saw the elk, outside a window, walking in the street, or grazing some stray bit of grass, unnoticed by anyone else. As they set up for a ritual, building the fire, Sean drawing an obtuse and ever-changing set of patterns on the ground, William asked about the creature.

"Your spirit animal," Sean replied. "The elk is a noble one. I believe that the things you see are all things it knows. The how and why of that, however… remain a mystery. There are a great many legends, often contradictory, but they do tell us something about their inclinations. You can learn a bit about a man, if you can find out his spirit animal."

"And yours?"

Sean hesitated. "A… grizzly bear."

"Why am I not surprised? What are some of the others?"

"Many of the animals of the forest. Deer, coyote, squirrel, mouse, snake, bat, cougar, lizard, even butterfly."

"A butterfly? Seems a bit odd."

"Exceedingly rare. It consumes its own world, and is reborn as something new. Change incarnate. Extremely powerful, very dangerous, terribly unpredictable. A spirit for times of crisis. Pray you never meet one."

William feigned distress. "I'll never look at a butterfly in my back yard the same way again!"

Sean simply grunted, returning to stoking the fire.

They performed their ritual. William encountered little of much concern to him, but he did catch a glimpse of Chloe, a teenager again, walking hand-in-hand down the street with a beautiful, long-haired blonde. A friend he hadn't seen before. They seemed very close. And happy. He was glad.

He also noticed that some of his newer visions contradicted previous ones. People's destinies, it seemed, were subject to change. A thought that wouldn't bother him, except that, as he started comparing what he was seeing with what he remembered, he found shifts in only one direction. Destinies were changing, and they were changing for the worse. Illnesses would develop, proposals would be rejected, accidents would happen, businesses would close. The town itself seemed to grow more desperate.

When he came to, he repeated the dull exercise of recounting his visions to Sean, who took notes all the while. He wondered at the purpose of this. "Sean. What are you really doing, with the information you get from me?"

"Mostly nothing," Sean replied mildly. "Here and there an investment, or a conversation. I need to protect my family's interests, but I'm not trying to change people's lives. My father learned the hard way that if he tried to change something meaningful, it tended to come about just the same, by alternate means."

"But people's fates are changing. They're getting worse."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps the veracity of the initial visions is suspect. There is no way to know."

"Are you sure? This has nothing to do with you?"

"I assure you, William, the misfortunes of the people here are simply their allotted destinies, not any fault of mine, or yours."

"I wish we could help. I'm not comfortable standing by while the town suffers."

"Indeed. But even if it were possible, truly altering destiny would seem a dangerous proposition."

William scowled. "And why is it always me? Have you ever done this yourself?"

"Many times. My father taught me, as his father taught him. But I have… exhausted what I can learn from my own visions."

William let this go. But his suspicions were aroused. Something wasn't right.

Chloe was born. He looked into her blue eyes and fell in love. "She looks like you," Joyce said, smiling weakly in the hospital bed.

William held his daughter carefully. She was so small and fragile. "Not as much as she looks like you!"

He had less interest in visions of the future after that. He was too concerned with the real world, now that Chloe was flesh and blood and everything was for her. But Sean was insistent. Chloe was still a baby, but he had added her to a list of "legacy" scholarships at Blackwell, a perk of his increasing financial support to the school. "So you know she'll have the best opportunities," he said. It was enough to get William to the clearing again. But, he resolved not to continue blindly following Sean's lead.

They met, this time, in the afternoon light.

"Where's the manzanita?" Sean asked, annoyed. They would add some of this plant to the fire; William didn't understand why, but a certain selection was required for the ritual to have much chance at success. Or so Sean claimed. How did he know? His grandfather's "research", the nature of which William had never discerned.

"Ah, my fault, sorry. I was distracted, it slipped my mind."

"Oh for the love of… go find some, will you?"

"I'm really having trouble concentrating today, I think it'd be best if I had a chance to clear my head before we got started."

Sean looked at him angrily, as if he were about to issue a stern rebuke. But instead he produced a choked assent. "Fine. I'll go find it myself." He trudged off into the woods. Manzanita was common enough but didn't grow this deep in the forest, which is why William generally cut some on the drive up and brought it along. Sean would be gone a while. Once the man was out of sight, William approached Sean's little collection of gear, and picked up the notebook he always used. It was an old, worn volume, thick, the binding ragged, the pages heavily thumbed. A string marked a page toward the end, and William opened it to that page.

Not unexpectedly, he found a ledger of extrapolated future facts from his previous visions. People changing jobs, moving, getting married, being born, getting sick, getting well, dying. Businesses opening and closing, buildings rising and falling. As he had seen it, all of this had been vibrant, colorful, the stuff of life itself; but here is in this dry volume it all seemed no more momentous than the shuffling of a stack of papers.

He flipped backward through the pages. Here and there a fact was annotated. Next to "D. Johnson, owner, Johnson's Hardware, deceased unexpectedly circa 1997" was the comment "doubled shop rent, seek new tenant in anticipation of business failure." Next to "G. Ramos married R. Ortiz, imminent, child circa 1995" was written "Fired Ortiz for coming in late, avoid maternity benefits. Potentially rehire later, good worker." William shuddered. I should never have cooperated with him, he thought. He continue flipping pages, stopped at a longer annotation, in red.

The original entry, in the usual black, read "B. Gordon elected city council, 11/1994, significant policy disagreements." Next to it, the red ink paraphrased a no-holds-barred effort to defeat Gordon, instead re-electing the unpopular incumbent, one C. Weaver. William remembered this election. He should have known Prescott's hands were all over it when the outcome contradicted his vision. The red annotation continued.

"Update 11/94 success. Side effects:"
"11/94 R. Weaver skiing injury, permanent disability."
"updated prediction 5/95 C. Weaver-owned motel bankrupt, consider purchase and remodel."
"updated prediction circa 1998 J. Weaver diagnosed congestive heart failure, previous predictions healthy."

William pondered this entry. Sean had lied to him. Side effects? he repeated to himself with contempt.

He started flipping back farther. There were other red entries, other "side effects". How long had this been going on? The years fell away as he turned the pages, and then, abruptly, the handwriting in the notebook changed. The content was almost identical, written by another man's hand. Sean's father, William realized. He turned to the first page, at the top of which was written "Book 2". The first entry was from 1972. He felt sick.

He skipped back toward the string, found the beginning of his work with Sean. What had induced the man to involve him in the first place? Preceding the log of his first vision was the simple note "New seer, W. Price, age 23. Strong minded, high potential." Before this, an odd entry. "6/91 Bear is actively pursuing now. Final ritual, use others going forward." William started reading backward. Before long he found another oddity. "1/91 Becoming dangerous. Side effects increasing, more intervention necessary." Perplexed, he continued hunting backward, when he heard the crunch of footfalls in the underbrush. Hurriedly, he closed and replaced the notebook, sat in his customary spot before the fire pit.

Sean returned to the clearing, bits of moss and dead leaves clinging to his sweater and jeans, clutching a fresh-cut bough of manzanita. He sounded cheerful enough. "For future reference, there's a stand of it down that way where the hill faces the ocean. Too much wind for the trees, I think." William stared at him with cold eyes. This would be the last time, and he would tell Sean nothing. But he had questions he wanted answered.

They proceeded as usual, and soon enough William was adrift in time. He found himself in front of the Two Whales diner, some people he didn't know having an argument on the sidewalk next to him. His old traveling companion, the bull elk, sauntered down the street not far away, its enormous antlers occupying an entire lane. William stepped off the curb and approached it.

"You! I want to know something!" he said, looking up at the animal's eye as it ambled past. But the elk ignored him totally, its leisurely pace carrying it at the speed of a strenuous walk, for a man. "Please!" William entreated, placing his hand on its flank.

At this, the elk spun around, lowered its head to William's eye level, and snorted at him. "Please," William said again. "There's a cost to this, isn't there? Can you show me? What price is going to be paid for… all this?"

The elk stared at him a moment, lowering its head, then jerked it up and forward, landing its nose in the middle of William's chest and sending him sprawling backward on the pavement, the wind knocked out of him. As he gasped and struggled to rise, the huge animal walked casually up to him and placed one hoof on his chest, pinning him. It bent its head down, bringing its nose to William's face. He could feel its hot breath ruffling his hair. And then everything went black.

He was upside down. His eyes were open but he couldn't see. He couldn't breath. He heard shouts nearby. "Call 911!" someone yelled.

He saw Joyce opening the front door of their house. He realized she was crying. Her hands were shaking. Chloe, a teenager, came into the hall, with a brown-haired girl. They looked nervous. "Chloe. Chloe come here. Your dad, he…" She broke down into sobs.

No! he thought. This isn't how it's supposed to go! I can't leave them! He struggled against the visions, tried to wake up, but there was no stopping them now.

Chloe leaned back in a chair, grimacing in pain. Beside her, a tattoo artist concentrated on his needle, working fine detail into the outline of a skull.

Chloe's hair was blue. She stared down the barrel of an automatic pistol, held by an angry young man in a red jacket. They struggled, and the gun went off. She fell to the ground.

Sean, older, sat in the back of a courtroom. The jury foreman was standing. "In the case of The State of Oregon vs. Nathan Prescott, on the count of murder in the second degree, we find the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity." Sean smiled. Further up in the audience, a woman stood, screaming at the jury. Joyce. The judge banged his gavel.

Sean sat at a mahogany desk, surrounded by walls lined with bookcases, bent over the stacked pages of some immense contract. Sunlight streamed in through two windows behind him. In front of the desk, an enormous grizzly bear paced, back and forth, back and forth. Seeming to lose patience, it turned and planted its front paws on the desk, and let loose a furious bellow directly into Sean's face. His eyes never wavered from his documents. He flipped to the next page.

William awoke, sweating, breathing hard. Stood up, jerking his partially-bandaged hand away from Sean.

"It's all changed, all ruined! You lied to me, you son of a bitch! This is all because of you! You, your father, your whole damned family!"

"Calm down, William. You helped me willingly, you also wanted a look at the future. Clearly you've seen something terrible, but we may still be able to… repair… whatever it is. Tell me."

"You're wrong, Prescott. I've seen it. Whenever you meddle with destiny, there's always a cost. A big one. The more you tinker with people's lives, the more twisted the town becomes. And now my family pays the price! You and I are through!"

"You're making a mistake, William. You have a bright future if you stick with me. Otherwise, you have no chance to improve your lot."

"Nothing you can do, none of this, can help me with what's coming. I'm quitting before it gets any worse than it already is. Maybe on my own I can find a way to change it."

"Doubtful. Don't be a fool."

"I was a fool to come here in the first place. No more! You stay away from me, and you stay away from my family!"

William turned his back, stormed off down the path, cursing his own gullibility. How could he ever save Chloe if he wasn't going to survive himself?