Nick was not too surprised to hear the buzzer.  It happened now and then in the late afternoon:  someone wanting to know if he’d contribute to Greenpeace, or sign a petition, or buy encyclopedias.  Usually he just told them no.  Not always—though he no longer bought more than two boxes of Girl Guide cookies to take into the precinct and leave by the coffee machine.  In his inimitable fashion, Schanke had made it quite clear that there were other people who also needed a place to dispose of the excess they’d felt compelled to purchase.
He was pretty sure, though, that there was still half a box of Jenny’s contribution to the snack pool.  Not Girl Guides, then.
He went over to the intercom, switched on the monitor, and looked at the screen.  He was less surprised to see Marian Blackwing than he felt he should have been.  Of course, he hadn’t realized she knew where he lived.  Also, the young shaman had moved out of her loft back to the reserve where older heads could advise her on the best use of her new abilities.  However, for several days now, he’d been having curious dreams of a light, bright forest, through which he chased a leather-clad will o’ the wisp....
“Welcome to town,” he said, taking her coat.  “Are you having a show?”
He draped the coat over the table and ushered her round his chair to the carpet in front of the fireplace.  She took in the blue tiles, the carved mantel, and the dragon with wondering eyes, and sat on the couch.
“No, it’s not that,” she said.  “It’s....” She hesitated, and looked slightly embarrassed.  “Do you ever look on line to see what the Forever Knight fans are doing?”
“On their mailing list?” Nick asked.
She nodded.
“Not recently.  It’s been getting more and more silent for months, and we’ve had a couple of tricky cases at work.  I’m afraid I just haven’t bothered.”
“I don’t much, either,” she admitted.  “I mean, why would I?  The producers only put my character into one of their episodes.”
Nick wasn’t sure what to say to this.
Marian looked round at the rest of the room, trying to correlate the loft she saw with the police detective she’d met briefly a few years back.  She was here because, when she’d asked Jess for advice, he’d suggested she talk to his old friend Joe Stonetree, and he’d sent her to ‘the best man for the job’.  Now she was approaching a near stranger.  Oh, she’d met Nick, of course:  she was sure he remembered her, as she remembered him.  But it had been a while; and, in any case, she’d never exactly got to know him intimately—or only intimately (if that was the right way to put it), which wasn’t quite the same thing.  She hadn’t known what to expect of his apartment, but it wasn’t this.
In the last few weeks, Nick had been winding down after work by painting again.  The easel with his latest sun sketch caught her eye—as an artist herself, this was inevitable—and she bounced up from the couch and headed back to the alcove under the stairs to take a good look at it.
“This is good!” she exclaimed.  “You paint?  I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, I just dabble,” said Nick, feigning modesty, but more than a little pleased.  “Marian,” he added, feeling that this was going to sidetrack them (and was maybe meant to), “why did you come here?  What’s wrong?”
She turned.  “Do you have a computer?  Can you go on line?” she asked him.  “If you look at the FORKNI-L posts from the last couple of weeks, you’ll understand then.”
Puzzled, he fetched out his laptop and put it on the dining table.  Her coat he slung over the back of the couch to make space; then he plugged in, hoping that no one would want to phone him, since he’d never bothered to get one of those cable connections.
As he scrolled back through the messages in his In Box, Marian spotted his work table, which had been pulled out on its castors to be accessible.  She inspected the paints he’d been using, wondering for a moment which store he preferred to use for his supplies.  Then she moved on to browse the paintings that leant against the back wall of the loft.  His style, she noted, was eclectic but the subject seemed to be overwhelmingly solar.  Just why he was so fixed on painting the sun she did not know; but clearly it had great significance to him.  She could feel that the darkness that had surrounded him when she’d met him before still troubled the light, and wondered if there was some connection.
About twenty minutes passed before Nick turned round.  Once or twice as he read, though, she caught a twitch in his spirit that, she suspected, coincided with a twitch of his lips.
Finally he switched off.
“They’ve made a faction for me?!” Marian burst out, with a note of incredulity.
“So it would seem.”  Humour bubbled in his voice.
“But what am I supposed to do?” she asked, slightly panicked.  “I’ve never had a faction before!  What does one do with it?”
He got up from the dining table and came over, putting his hands on her arms reassuringly.
“No, no,” he said.  "One doesn't ‘do’ anything with a faction.  It’s up to them to decide what they do.”