Книга - Coyote Dreams

Coyote Dreams
C.E. Murphy


Instead of powerful forces storming Seattle, a more insidious invasion is happening.Most of Joanne Walker's fellow cops are down with the blue flu–or rather the blue sleep. Yet there's no physical cause anyone can point to–and it keeps spreading. It has to be magical, Joanne figures. But what's up with the crazy dreams that hit her every time she closes her eyes? Are they being sent by Coyote, her still-missing spirit guide?The messages just aren't clear. Somehow Joanne has to wake up her sleeping friends while protecting those still awake, figure out her inner-spirit dream life and, yeah, come to terms with these other dreams she's having about her boss….









Praise for

C.E. Murphy

and her books:


The Walker Papers

Coyote Dreams

“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Thunderbird Falls

“The breakneck pace keeps things moving…helping make this one of the most involving and entertaining new supernatural mystery series in an increasingly crowded field.”

—LOCUS

“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”

—Library Journal

Urban Shaman

“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”

—Jim Butcher, author of the bestselling series The Dresden Files

“C.E. Murphy has written a spellbinding and enthralling urban fantasy in the tradition of Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey.”

—The Best Reviews

“Tightly plotted and nicely paced, Murphy’s latest has a world in which ancient and modern magic fuse almost seamlessly…Fans of urban fantasy are sure to enjoy this first book in what looks to be an exciting new series.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

[nominee for Reviewer’s Choice Best Modern Fantasy]

The Negotiator

Hands of Flame

“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

House of Cards

“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”

—LOCUS

“The second title in Murphy’s Negotiator series is every bit as interesting and fun as the first. Margrit is a fascinatingly complex heroine who doesn’t shy away from making difficult choices.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Heart of Stone

“[An] exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A fascinating new series…as usual, Murphy delivers interesting worldbuilding and magical systems, believable and sympathetic characters and a compelling story told at a breakneck pace.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews











C.E. Murphy

Coyote Dreams


BOOK THREE: THE WALKER PAPERS







For Ted,

because I wouldn’t be here without him.




Acknowledgments


Most especially, I want to say thank you to my husband, Ted. The kernel of this series was his, and I quite literally wouldn’t be here without him. I love you, hon. Let’s hope there are lots of Walker Papers to celebrate in the future.

Thanks are also due to cover artist Hugh Syme; my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey; and my agent, Jennifer Jackson; as well as my usual suspects, particularly Silkie, who once more went beyond the call of duty in doing unpaid research and catching my embarrassing spelling errors.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE




CHAPTER ONE


Tuesday, July 5, 8:58 a.m.

Someone had driven a tire iron into my skull. I could tell, because centered in my left temple was a vast throbbing pain that could only come from desperate injury. It felt like there were a thousand vicious gnomes leaping up and down on the iron, trying to increase the size of the hole in my head. I had the idea that once it was split open far enough, they would run down the length of metal and dive into the soft, gooey gray matter of my brain and have themselves a little gnomish pool party.

Neither of my eyes would open. I fumbled a hand up to poke at them and encountered sufficient goo that I took a moment to consider the possibility that the gnomes were already in my head, had overfilled it and were now flowing out my sinuses and tear ducts. It wasn’t a pretty thought. Then again, nothing could be a pretty thought when someone’d smashed a tire iron into my head.

I rolled my fingers across my eyelashes, trying to work some of the ook out of them. My heart was beating like a rabbit on speed, except when it paused with an alarming little arrhythmia that made me start hyperventilating. I hoped I was dying, because anything else seemed anticlimactic with all that going on. Besides, I had some experience with dying. It was kind of old hat, and so far it hadn’t stuck.

Unlike my eyes. I physically pried one open with my fingers. The red numbers on my alarm clock jumped into it and stabbed it with white-hot pokers. I whimpered and let it close again, wondering why the hell I was in my bed, if I was dying. Usually I found myself dying in more exotic locations, like diners or city parks.

A whisper of memory drifted through my brain in search of something to attach itself to. The department’s Fourth of July picnic had been the day before. I’d attended, feeling saucy and cute in a pair of jeans shorts and a tank top. I’m five foot eleven and a half. Cute and I are not generally on speaking terms, so the feeling had been a novel one and I’d been enjoying it. The outfit had shown off a rare tan and the fact that I’d lost twelve pounds in the past few months, and I’d gotten several compliments. Those were as rare as me rubbing elbows with cute, so it’d been a good day.

Which did nothing to explain how it had ended with a tire iron separating the bones of my cranium. I walked my fingers over the left side of my head, cautiously. My fingers encountered hair too short to be tangled, but no tools of a mechanic’s trade. I pressed my hand against my temple, admiring how nice and cool it felt against the splitting headache, and the memory found something to attach itself to.

Morrison. My boss. Smiling fatuously down at a petite redhead in Daisy Mae shorts that hugged her va-va-va-voom curves. Right about then somebody’d offered me a beer, and it’d sounded like an awfully good idea. I tried to close my eyes in a pained squint, but I’d never gotten them open, so I only wrinkled them and felt crusty goo crinkle around my lashes.

The only other thing I remember clearly was a bunch of guys from the shop swooping down on me as they—each—bore a fifth of Johnnie Walker. With my last name being Walker, they figured me and Johnnie must be cousins and that gave me a leg up on them. I was pretty sure my leg up had turned into a slide down the slow painful descent of hangover hell.

I gave up on rubbing my eyes and prodding my head, and instead flopped my arm out to the side with a heartfelt grunt.

Unfortunately, the grunt wasn’t mine.

It turned out my eyes were willing to come open after all, with sufficient force behind the attempt. I wasn’t sure I had eyelashes left after the agony of ripping through loaded-up sleep, but at least the subsequent tears did something to wash away some of the goop. I was out of bed and halfway across the room with a slipper in hand, ready to fling it like the deadly weapon it wasn’t, when I noticed I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

Neither was the blurry-eyed guy who’d grunted when I’d smacked him. At least not on his upper half. He pushed up on his elbows while I scrubbed at my eyes with my free hand. I’d gone to sleep with my contacts in, which partly explained why there was such a lot of gunk in my lashes, but I didn’t believe what my twenty-twenty vision was telling me. I was pretty certain the goo had to be impairing it somehow, because—

—because damn, sister!

“Easy on the eyes” didn’t cover it. He was so easy on the eyes that they just sort of rolled right off him as precursor to a girl turning into a puddle of—

All right, there was way too much goo going on in my morning. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded, then coughed. I sounded like I’d been on a three-day drunk. In my defense, I knew it wasn’t more than a one-night drunk, but Jesus.

“Mark,” he said in a sleepy, good-natured sort of rumble, and grinned at me. “Who’re you?”

“What’re you doing here?” I asked instead of answering. He arched one eyebrow and looked my naked self over, then lifted the covers a few inches to inspect his own lower half.

“I’d say I’m havin’ a real good night.” He grinned again and flopped back onto my bed, arms folded behind his head. His hair was this amazing color between blond and brown, not dishwater, but glimmering with shadows and streaks of light. His folded-back arms displayed smoothly muscular triceps. Who ever heard of someone having noticeably beautiful triceps, for heaven’s sake? The puff of hair in his armpits was, at least, an ordinary brown and not waxed away. That would’ve been more than I could handle.

“So who’re you?” he asked again, pleasantly. More than pleasantly. More like the cat who’d stolen the cream, eaten the canary and then knocked the dog out of the sunbeam so he could loll in it undisturbed.

For a moment I was tempted to open the curtains so I could see if he’d stretch out and expose his belly to the morning sunlight. God should be so good as to give every woman such a view once in her life.

The thing was—well, there were many things. Many, many things and all of them led back to me being unable to think of the last time I’d done something so astoundingly stupid.

No, that wasn’t true. I knew exactly the last time I’d done something so astoundingly stupid. I’d been fifteen, and I’d have hoped the intervening thirteen years of experience would be enough to keep me from doing it again. Only I hadn’t been shitface drunk then, and if the God who was kind enough to provide the gorgeous man in my bed was genuinely kind, there wouldn’t be the same consequences there’d been then.

The point was, Mark was so far out of my league it wasn’t even funny. I didn’t think I’d said that out loud until he pushed up on an elbow again and looked me over a second time before saying, “I beg to differ,” in a mildly affronted tone. Then curiosity clearly got the better of him as he sat all the way up, drawing his knees up and looping his arms around them as he squinted at me. He had a tattoo on his right shoulder, a butterfly whose colors were so bright it had to be new. His biceps were magnificent. He had smooth sleek muscle where most people didn’t even have flab. It was like he took up more space than he really ought to.

Which, in my experience, suggested he probably wasn’t human.

I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud, either, until he threw his head back and laughed, then scooted around on my bed like he belonged there, giving me a curious grin. “What is your name?”

“Joanne,” I finally answered. “Joanne Walker. SPD,” I added faintly, for no evident reason. Maybe I thought announcing I worked for the police department would provide me with some kind of physical shielding.

It struck me that clothes would be a lot more effective in that arena. Still clutching my slipper as a weapon, I scampered for the bathroom and pulled my rarely used robe off the door.

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Joanne Walker,” he called after me. I stuck my head out the door incredulously.

“Is that what you call it?”

“What should I call it?” He shrugged, a beautiful movement like glass flowing. “I’m gettin’ a kinda freaked-out vibe from you, ma’am. You want I should vacate the premises?”

“I want you should tell me you had rubbers in your wallet and you don’t anymore, and that you’ve got a nice clean blood test in your hip pocket. I’ll think about the rest of it after that.” I retreated into the bathroom again and poked through the garbage nervously. Funny what strikes a girl as relieving in the midst of mental crisis. Having a naked guy whose name I barely knew in my bed would normally be more than enough reason to come apart at the seams, but oh no. Give me a little evidence of safe sex despite drunken revelry and it seemed I could handle the naked guy.

Pity there was no such evidence. Despite that, my hind brain announced it wouldn’t half mind handling the naked guy. More than once. Which, in fact, I could only presume that I had.

Augh.

“Sorry,” he said. “Still got three in my wallet.”

Three. I stopped poking around in the garbage to stare though the wall at him. “Confident, aren’t you?”

I heard a grin come into his drawl: “Looks like I got cause, ma’am. I had five to begin with,” he added cheerfully. I lurched to the door so I could stare at him more effectively. I’d developed some unusual skills lately, but X-ray vision hadn’t been one of them.

“Are you serious?”

“No,” he said, still cheerfully. “Sorry, ma’am.”

Jesus. I didn’t remember the last time I got laid, or more accurately, I remembered in exquisite, precise detail, and now it appeared I’d missed an all-nighter of action thanks to way, way too much whiskey in the jar. That was wrong on so many levels I didn’t even know where to begin.

“Stop calling me ma’am.” For some reason I found the ma’aming kind of charming, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be charmed. I wasn’t sure what I wanted at all. All my base impulses were to throw the guy out and hide under the bed until it all went away. It’d been an approach to life that had worked pretty well until recently, but a couple of weeks ago it’d become violently clear that the ostrich strategy wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Violently was the key word: there were two people dead because I’d refused to step up to the plate when I should have. So much as I wanted to take my slipper and drive Mitch out of my apartment with it, I kind of thought maybe I should do something adult and sensible, like own up to my great, huge, flaming mistake and try to cope.

The tire iron reasserted its presence in my skull. I groaned and grabbed my head, trying to focus on a cool, silver-blue flutter of power that typically resided beneath my breastbone. A hangover, in a mechanic’s parlance, was essentially an overheated engine—dehydration in any form fit nicely into that analogy—and helping someone recover from dehydration was in my bag of tricks. I called on that power, for once selfishly glad to have access to it.

Absolutely nothing happened.

No, that wasn’t true. Reluctance happened, a feeling I’d encountered once before, when I tried healing a knife cut on my cheek. That cut had left a scar when being stabbed through the chest by a four foot sword hadn’t: my newly-awakened power’s way of announcing that it thought some things should be acknowledged and dealt with on a purely human level.

Apparently hangovers fell into that category, too.

I whimpered and dared peek at myself in the mirror while I got a glass of water and fumbled for aspirin. Aside from the sleepy eyes, I didn’t look nearly as awful as I thought I should. In fact, between the tan, the mussy hair and what could reasonably be called a rosy, satisfied glow, I actually looked sort of hot. As in sexy, not overheated, the latter of which being how I’d normally use the word. The robe was even this nice soft mossy green that played up the hazel in my eyes.

Mitch or Matt or Mark or whatever the hell his name was, appeared in the reflection behind me. He’d put his jeans on and left the top buttons undone, which was possibly more distracting than him being naked. My eyes just sort of slid right down his torso and fixated at that little flat bit of belly before more interesting things got started.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those?” he asked in a woeful little-boy voice. I flinched, slammed the aspirin with a gulp of water and handed him the mug without rinsing it or refilling it. Ordinarily I’d think that was gross, but under the circumstances, being squeamish about swapping a few bodily fluids seemed hypocritical. Matt seemed to feel the same way, because he took the cup without comment and put out his other hand for some aspirin. I dropped two in his palm and he popped them, then sagged against the bathroom wall with a groan and extended the mug again. “More,” he pleaded, putting enough pathos into the croaked word that I erupted a startled giggle. He gave me an adorable wan grin in return and I got him some more water, then took the cup back and drank another fourteen ounces myself. When I was done I felt like my equilibrium had been restored, which I knew perfectly well was a big fat lie, but I planned to run with it, anyway.

“So.” I leaned on the counter and looked at his reflection behind me. He was taller than I was by at least three inches. I couldn’t remember having ever slept with somebody who was taller than me before.

For that matter, I still couldn’t.

My brain went augh again and I squinched my face up. Mike’s reflection made concerned eyebrows at me. “So,” he echoed, as if it might smooth my features out again. It worked, because I forced my own eyebrows up to make myself stop squinting.

“What was your name again?”

“Mark.”

“Mark. Right.” I pressed my lips together, staring at our reflections. He looked sort of woeful and cute and headachy, and throwing him out seemed kind of like kicking a puppy. “I don’t suppose you can cook, Mark.”

He gave me a big bright grin in the mirror. “Just tell me where the kitchen is.”



The problem with my kitchen was it didn’t have anything to cook in it. Mark slapped around the linoleum floor barefoot and cast me looks of unmitigated dismay as he opened cupboards that would do Old Mother Hubbard proud. His butterfly shifted subtly with the play of muscle in his shoulder, as if it might wing away from his skin. I watched it and mumbled, “There are toaster waffles in the freezer.”

It was the best I could do. I had no raw ingredients in my apartment; the only reason there were eggs was my weakness for fried-egg sandwiches. That was as close to cooking as I got. The rest of it was frozen dinners and canned soup. Even the frozen dinners were a real step up for me. A year ago it’d been all about the macaroni and cheese. Since then I’d met a seventy-three-year-old man whose physique put mine to shame, so I’d started making an effort to eat meals that at least came supplied with a serving of vegetables. The seventy-three-year-old looked pleased, then started nagging me about my sodium intake. I couldn’t win.

“How can you have that body and nothing but junk food in your cupboards?” Mark asked when he’d finished looking behind every door in the kitchen. I looked down at my terry-cloth-clad self and wrinkled my forehead.

“That body?” I knew I’d lost some weight, but the way he said it you’d think I was a cover model. “I walk a lot at work,” I added lamely. “Beat cop.”

“It’s not nice to beat cops,” he said, mock-severely. I blinked, and a smile swam into place. At least if I was picking guys up in fits of drunken idiocy, they were not only handsome, but also even mildly clever.

Speaking of which. “How, um. I mean, who, um. I mean, um.” Okay, only one of us got the Mildly Clever Badge for the morning, and it sure wasn’t me.

“Barb Bragg is my sister,” he volunteered, somehow managing to translate my garbled question into something coherent. “Redhead? Yea tall?” He made a gesture around five and a half feet from the floor, and took a frying pan out of my cupboard. “She’s got some buddies in the North Precinct and got invited along to the barbeque. I tagged along. Never could resist a woman in uniform.”

I stared at his shoulders. Nice wide world-supporting shoulders that tapered into a narrow waist and hips that—“I wasn’t in uniform,” I muttered. He flashed a grin over his shoulder at me. His teeth were very slightly crooked. It was the only thing that saved him from sheer perfection. He couldn’t possibly be real, although my dreams weren’t usually this good. “Are you actually real?”

“Guess I can’t resist a woman out of uniform, either. Leastways not when she can out-arm-wrestle me.” He did a double take at me. “Am I real? I dunno. Did you want an after-party drunken philosophy answer, or just my driver’s license?”

“The license would be great.” I was pretty sure the average godling or demon or monster under the bed didn’t carry one, although I hadn’t thought to ask any of the ones I’d met. I’d try to remember, next time. Mark arched an eyebrow, then took his wallet out of his back pocket and tossed it to me.

I opened it and pulled out an Arizona state driver’s license that had a relievingly bad picture of Mark, along with his birth date—he was two years younger than me—and an organ donor’s stamp. A knot I didn’t know was there untied beneath my heart. I could look up his license number at the precinct, but the fact that he even had ID was an awfully good start. I put it away and let out a fwoosh of air. “Did I really beat you arm wrestling? You must’ve been really shitfaced.” My biceps weren’t sore and I was sure I didn’t have the upper-body strength to match his smooth muscles in a fair fight.

Not sore seemed rather important there for a moment, but Mark laughed, which was surprisingly distracting. He looked even brighter and prettier when he laughed, just all-around sparkling with geniality. I kind of liked it.

“Either that or I know what hill to die on.” In the time it’d taken me to peruse his ID, he’d taken over my kitchen, and now appeared to be making omelets. I hadn’t known I had omelet fixings, but he was managing. Omelets with chili and cheese, no less. And toast. He’d even taken a can of orange juice out of the freezer. Maybe I needed to get drunk and pick guys up more often. I’d never managed to get such a babe to sluff around my kitchen half naked when I’d tried sober dating. Not that I’d done that for a while, either.

“Your sister,” I said. “She wouldn’t be the one in the Daisy Mae shorts, would she?”

“That’s her, yep. A million pounds of punch packed into a teeny-weeny body. Cute, isn’t she?”

I knew there was some kind of enormous cosmic irony going on here, but I put my head down on the table, held my breath and hoped, just for a moment, that it would all go away.

Instead, the doorbell rang.




CHAPTER TWO


“Want me to get that?” Mark asked easily. Maybe he was accustomed to waking up in strange women’s beds as a matter of course and had a certain protocol about it all. Me, I wasn’t accustomed to that sort of thing at all, and leaped out of my chair with a yelped “No!” The chair banged into the wall and I ran for the door as if Mark might disregard my reply and whisk himself off to open it. The smell of omelets cooking made my stomach rumble impatiently as I unlocked the door and pulled it open to find a big old man with bushy eyebrows looking at me quizzically.

“Nice robe. You ain’t cookin’ an old man breakfast, are you? ’Cause I brought doughnuts. Besides, I know how you cook.”

I clutched the collar of my robe closed, feeling like a fifties housewife. “Uh. Gary. Uh. Hi. What’re you—ah, shit!” God, my prowess with the language was stunning today. I was an embarrassment to the diploma laying claim to a B.A. in English lying somewhere in my apartment. “Gary, I, uh, forgot.”

He squinted down at me, gray eyes curious. Gary Muldoon was the most solid, real-looking person I’d ever met in my life, and at seventy-three he still had the build of the linebacker he’d been in college. But there was a bit of tiredness in the Hemingway wrinkles, and he was moving slower than he had when I met him, thanks to a heart attack a few weeks earlier.

A heart attack that was my fault, something I couldn’t forget. Even the memory made a nervous flutter in my stomach.

It wasn’t your usual butterflies. It was the way I perceived the power that had awoken in me seven months earlier, when catching sight of a fleeing woman through an airplane window had triggered a series of what I considered to be remarkably unfortunate events. Finding the woman had resulted, more or less directly, in getting a sword stuffed through my lungs. While I was busy dying, a snide coyote dropped by my psyche and gave me the option to survive the skewering—as a shaman. A healer, one with Great Things in store for me.

If I’d known then what I know now…

All right, I’d have made the same decision, because nobody wants to die at twenty-six if there’s a choice in the matter. But I didn’t want to be a shaman. The whole idea that there was a magic-filled alternative to our world made my skin itch. I like rational, sensible explanations for things: that was part of why I was a mechanic by trade. Or had been, anyway. Vehicle diagnostics were simple and straight-forward. Follow a certain set of steps and the vehicle runs better. Et voilà. Normal.

Having an insistent, fluttery coil of power centered right below my sternum, impatient to be used to right the world, is not normal. And that bubble was what shivered in me every time I saw Gary, partly because he was still healing, and partly because his illness really had been my fault.

I’d spent most of the past six months ignoring my power as best I could. It turned out that had been a massive error in judgment. Among other things, it let a very nasty person induce a heart attack in my closest friend so I’d be distracted while the world went to hell in a handbasket. It had worked extremely well.

I was capable of learning from my mistakes. After six months of strenuous denial, I finally realized I was going to have to suck it up and learn to use this power, because otherwise I was going to be used and taken advantage of. Worse, my friends were in danger, and that, if nothing else, was enough to convince me to pull my head out of my ass.

I put my hand over Gary’s heart. A little thread of glee burst free from that coil of power inside me, silver-blue light splashing up my arm, under the skin, as if it followed the blood vessels. It probably did. Through that spatter of power I could feel the steady, comforting strength of an ancient tortoise, sharing its spirit—and, I hoped, its longevity—with Gary. It was the one thing I’d done right recently, bringing a totem animal back to help heal my friend.

The tortoise accepted my offering of vitality, though I got a sense of amusement from it as I worked through my favorite analogy: cars. To me, patching up a heart that’d had an attack was like changing out bald tires. They were worn and tired, just like an attack made the heart, but you couldn’t just switch out one heart for another. I liked the idea of working from the inside, like I could slip a new tire around the hub and slowly inflate it, strengthening the old muscle with newer healthy cells. Every time I saw Gary I threw a little of that idea into him, trying to help fix the damage I’d allowed to be done. I expected his next annual checkup to determine he had the heart of a twenty-five-year-old.

“How could you forget?” he demanded as I let my hand fall again. “We been doin’ this every day for the past ten days, Jo. And your eggs are gonna burn.”

“What’s ‘this’?” Mark came out of the kitchen, all full of tenor good cheer. “Crap, Joanne, are you seeing somebody? I’m sorry if I screwed—oh.” He got a good look at Gary and evidently categorized him as too old. That was new. Half the people I knew were convinced I was involved in a lusty May-December romance.

“The eggs aren’t going to burn,” Mark added with a broad grin, and offered his hand to Gary. “I’m Mark.”

I wrinkled up my face, afraid to look at Gary, but one eye peeped open, unable to look away, either.

He’d all but dropped his teeth, jaw long and eyes googly. He was staring at Mark, but somehow managed to encompass me in that stare, making me squirm. I felt like a teenager caught necking with her boyfriend. Gary put his hand out and shook Mark’s without winding his jaw back up, and Mark gave him another broad smile. “You Joanne’s dad?”

“No!” Gary and I said at the same time. Mark’s eyebrows went up and he rocked back on his heels a bit. “Just a friend,” I muttered. Gary transferred his googly-eyed stare to me, and it was a lot worse than when he’d managed to pull off gaping at me without actually looking directly at me. I squirmed again. “I, um, yesterday was the department picnic, and, um…”

Gary handed the box of doughnuts to Mark and said, in his best deep-voiced dangerous rumble, “Could you excuse us a minute, son?”

Mark retreated to the kitchen while I gave Gary a steely-eyed look of my own, hoping to head him off at the pass. “‘Son’? Women get ‘dame’ and ‘broad’ and ‘lady,’ and he gets ‘son’?”

“It’s part of my charm,” Gary muttered, then scowled enormously at me. “You okay, Jo?” There was no reprimand in his voice at all, just a hell of a lot of concern.

My mouth bypassed my brain entirely and said, for no reason I was willing to admit to, “Morrison was flirting with this redhead.” To my huge irritation, that clearly made sense, because Gary’s expression landed between understanding and sympathy, with a good dose of wryness thrown in. I said “Shit,” and stomped into the kitchen. Gary closed the door behind himself and followed me.

“Hungry?” Mark asked genially. “Plenty where this came from.” He lifted the frying pan and then slid its omelet onto a plate that already had two slices of buttered toast on it. I was in the presence of culinary genius. Gary eyed me, eyed Mark, and shrugged.

“I could eat. ’Cept you sure you want to eat, Jo? You know it’ll ground you.” He put on a solicitous tone, but underneath it I heard: don’t eat anything, we got work to do. Gary had been there, quite literally standing over me, when my powers woke up. Frankly, he handled the entire thing a lot better than I ever had. I was, he’d told me more than once, the most interesting thing that’d happened to him in the three years since his wife had died, and he wasn’t going to miss out on any of it. I wasn’t at all sure I liked being an interesting thing. It was like the proverbial Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. I’d far rather live in really, really boring times. Especially since much of the interesting part seemed to be directly focused on trying to make me dead. Boring was good.

With this in mind, I took the plate like a lifer in prison, hunching myself over it protectively. “Right now I need some serious grounding.”

“What are you,” Mark said, “some kind of electrician or something? I thought you were a cop.” He brought a glass of orange juice to the table and gave me a quirky little grin that went a fair way toward melting my knees, even if I both knew better and was sitting down, anyway. Nobody ever said knee-melting only worked on the vertical.

I managed to mutter, “Thanks,” and tried giving Gary the hairy eyeball to shut him up, but he answered Mark with such blasé cheer I knew he was ignoring me on purpose.

“Not that kinda grounding. Spiritual grounding. Food anchors your soul to your body, makes it a lot harder to go spirit questing. Jo here’s a shaman.” He said it all casual-like, but his gray eyes were sharp and judging as Mark went back to the stove to make another omelet. Me, I just sank down into my chair until my nose practically touched the eggs, and shoveled as many bites into my mouth as I could before Gary took notice of me again.

“No shit,” Mark said curiously. “Like a medicine man? What exactly does a shaman do, anyway?” He grinned, bright and open. “Get hooked up with some peyote, maybe?”

My stomach contracted around the food I’d eaten. I unhunched from over the plate and Mark noticed, speaking a little more quickly, as if he was afraid I’d cut him off. Which was exactly what I’d been going to do, so I couldn’t exactly blame him.

“No, no, look, I’m sorry, I’m kidding. Bad joke, sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, expression all fussed as he looked at me. “I just never met a shaman before. Guess I don’t know what to say. Mom says her grandad was Navajo—”

“What,” Gary said, “not a Cherokee princess? I thought those came standard these days.”

I shot him a look. I actually was part Cherokee, although not through remote ancestors. My father’d grown up in Qualla Boundary and I’d gone to high school there. There were a lot of people there who legitimately could claim Cherokee blood, but most of them weren’t royalty. Mostly it seemed like people from much further away than the Carolinas—or Oklahoma—had managed to land themselves the royal blood. It was like the U.S. version of being descended from Cleopatra.

Mark only laughed. The guy was nine kinds of casual. Maybe he did this for a living, like the kid in Six Degrees of Separation. Never mind his health or my peace of mind. It seemed like I shouldn’t trust him.

I’d start not trusting him as soon as I was done eating breakfast. I hunched over it again, hoping Gary wouldn’t notice.

“Nah. I guess my family came over from England in the early nineteenth century and settled in the southwest during one of the land rushes. Never had a chance to hook up with Cherokee royalty.”

“Just Navajo.”

“Well, she never said he was royalty.” Mark slid me a wink and a bit of an “Overprotective, isn’t he?” look. I avoided Gary’s eyes and stuffed a too-large piece of omelet into my mouth. “Anyway, whether he was or not, that’s like the total of my familiarity with Indian culture.”

“Native American,” Gary said in a tone that sounded remarkably like one I’d employed on him some months earlier, when he’d called me Indian. Mark had the grace to turn red around his jawline and lift his hands in apology.

“Native American. Sorry. Maybe you can tell me about it sometime, Joanne. I’d like to hear about it.”

So he was good-looking, but he was bonkers. Anybody who was that agreeable about the possibility of magic woo-woo stuff in people he’d just met pretty much had to be. I knew I shouldn’t trust him. At least my friends at the police department had gotten mixed up in my séance-thing back in January because they knew me and wanted to help, not because they were buying into a whole big weird world of Other out there.

Gary grunted, a small noise that I couldn’t interpret as pleased or displeased, and saved me from responding by saying, “Not now. We got work to do.”

“Sure,” Mark said easily. “Some other time. I don’t want to get in the way.”

I inhaled a chili bean and started coughing, then washed cough and bean down with a long swig of orange juice. The acidity made my nose sting, and the whole combination made my eyes water, which let me open my eyes all the way. Overall I called it a win and stuffed an entire half slice of toast into my mouth before anybody could expect me to say anything. I didn’t see why I should. Gary and Mark seemed to be getting on just fine.

The doorbell rang.

My social life was not such that the doorbell rang twice in one week, much less twice in five minutes. I stuck my head out, turtle-like, over my omelet, surprise keeping me in the pose for a few seconds. Then, afraid Gary would dump my food if I left it unguarded, I clutched the plate and went to answer the door.

A leggy blond woman and a six-year-old girl stood outside it. The girl noticed neither the bathrobe nor the plate of food I held and squealed, “Ossifer Walker!” before leaping up into my arms with the confidence of a child who’d never been dropped.

Chili-cheese omelet went flying over the door, the rug and the girl as I fumbled the plate while catching her. Her mother looked completely dismayed. “I am so sorry. I thought—it was this morning, wasn’t it? Tuesday, nine-fifteen? We were going to have a tour of the station?”

“Oh, God.” I juggled the girl around until she was sitting on my hip, and gave her a falsely bright smile that she didn’t seem to see through. “Hi, Ashley. You look nice and healthy. Are you keeping hydrated?”

“Yes,” she announced, pleased with knowing the word. “I drink six glasses of water a day.” She held up all ten fingers, demonstratively, and my fakey smile turned into a real grin.

“Good for you. Um, Ashley? We’ve got chili all over ourselves. We should probably get cleaned up.”

“Do we hafta?”

“Yes,” her mother and I said together, and I put Ashley down. I’d encountered her a few weeks earlier, the victim of heat stroke. My power had refused to let me ignore it that time, and once her core temperature was stabilized I’d sent her to the hospital. She’d come away from it with the idea that I was some kind of hero, and that she wanted to grow up to be a “peace ossifer,” just like me. “I’m sorry,” I said to her mother. Allison. Allison and Ashley Hampton. Just the names sounded like they belonged somewhere a lot ritzier than a college apartment turned permanent abode. “I completely spaced it. If you’re not in a time crunch I can get cleaned up and—”

“Wow,” Ashley said dreamily. I wrinkled up my face and looked over my shoulder. Mark, in all his half-naked glory, was leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, grinning. See, when a six-year-old notices that a guy’s gorgeous, you know it’s not just your overactive imagination telling you he is.

“Breakfast, ladies?” He was going to use all the food in my house. “We’ve got omelets and doughnuts.”

“Mommy!” Ashley crowed. “Can I have a doughnut pllleaaaase?”

“You already had breakfast, Ashley,” Allison said automatically. Ashley wriggled all over.

“I know, but plllleaaaaase?”

“Come on in.” A sense of the absurd was blooming over me, forming a stupid amused smile on my face. “Join the party. Mark can feed you,” I said, like that was perfectly normal, “and I’ll get dressed and we can go to the station.” I ushered Allison Hampton into the apartment, leaned on the door and waited for another shoe to drop.

The phone rang, and I laughed out loud. Everyone peered at me curiously as I made my way over chili-stained carpet to pick it up. “Grand Central Station.”

“This is Phoebe,” a woman said. “You’ve been a total flake the last two weeks, so I’m calling to remind you about your—”

“Fencing lesson,” I said with a groan that sounded like a laugh even to me. “I know this is going to shock you, but—”

“You forgot.” Phoebe sounded smug. “That’s why I’m calling. If you’re not here in—” I could imagine her looking at her watch in the pause “—twenty-three minutes,” she went on, “I’m going to come kick your tall skinny ass up and down the Ave. I will never make a fencer of you if you don’t come to practice, Joanne.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said, except she didn’t, because not only did my mother have an Irish accent, but she’d also dumped me with my father when I was three months old, so I’d never had the pleasure, or lack thereof, of being lectured by her. At least, not until after she was dead, which was some more of that lack of normality that I didn’t like about my life. Nonetheless, Phoebe sounded like what I imagined mothers to sound like.

“Twenty-two minutes, Joanne.”

“I can’t make it,” I said with a shrug. Ashley, in the background, squealed with delight. I looked into the kitchen to see Mark flipping an omelet, like he was a real chef or something. “I’ve got company,” I added, although Phoebe knew me well enough she’d never believe it.

“It’s nine in the morning. How can you have company? You’re always saying you have no life.”

I held the phone out toward the kitchen. “Everyone please say hello to Phoebe.”

A chorus of hellos swept over me and I put the phone back to my ear. “See?”

“All right,” Phoebe said in a no-nonsense voice, “but we’re going out clubbing tonight so you can tell me what this is all about.”

“Clubbing,” I echoed. “What, like cavemen?”

“You’re the only person I know who might really mean that. Clubbing as in dance clubbing, after dinner.”

“I see. Are you threatening me into social activities?”

“Yes. And if you say no I’ll beat you up.”

I grinned. “Assuming I ever come to another lesson so you can.” I’d taken up fencing after a sword-bearing god had skewered me. Shaman lessons, those freaked me out. Fencing lessons, those were basically normal. Even I could see the pattern developing. “Okay,” I said, heading off Phoebe’s splutters. “Tonight. We’ll do something. I promise.”

“See you at eight,” she said in a tone that brooked no compromise, and hung up.

The doorbell rang. I turned around and gaped at it. Gary came out of the kitchen, looking as astonished as I did. “I can’t imagine,” I said before he asked, and went back to the door to answer it for the third time that morning.

“Walker.” Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department stood on my doorstep, looking less like a superhero and more like a sunburned, unhappy man than usual. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and the collar of his shirt was loose, neither of which I could remember ever seeing on him before. Even dressed down, he was enough snazzier than me that he took in my moss-green robe and messy hair with a single scathing glance. “Get dressed. Holliday’s in a coma.”




CHAPTER THREE


My hangover returned with a vengeance, a brand-new tire iron slamming into my brain along with Morrison’s words. For a moment my vision doubled, so there were two tense-looking Morrisons looming over me. I checked the impulse to stand on my toes so Morrison’s shod state didn’t make him marginally taller than me. Normally we looked each other in the eye, the same height right down to the last half inch.

“What? I just saw him last night. He was fine. What are you talking about? Is Mel okay?” I backed out of the door even as I asked questions, letting Morrison into my apartment.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Gary said from the kitchen doorway. Morrison didn’t quite do a double take at the old man, but it was a near thing, his lips thinning and nostrils flaring. “Mr. Muldoon.” Morrison was one of those who thought I had Something Going On with Gary. He transferred his attention back to me, expression saying both, “I knew it,” and at the same time clearly wondering why I wasn’t dressed and ready to go yet. “Melinda Holliday called me this morning to inform me Detective Holliday wouldn’t be in. Sometime after midnight last night he fell into a sleep that he can’t be woken from. She’s all right,” he added a little more gently. “Upset, but all right.”

Panic clutched my heart in quick pulses. Billy Holliday was one of my oldest friends at the department, a big man whose unfortunate name had prompted him to a cross-dressing quirk. At least, that was my theory. I’d never been brave enough, or maybe rude enough, to ask outright why he did it.

Oddly, that wasn’t the thing he got ridden about at work. People had adapted to the nail polish and the occasional appearance in a brightly colored sundress, possibly because Billy’s biceps were bigger than most people’s heads, but also because he was a hell of a detective, and the truth was most people didn’t give a damn what kind of oddnesses you were into if you were good at your job.

That, and he had another quirk that seemed safer to pick on. Billy Holliday was a True Believer when it came to the world of the paranormal. He made Mulder look like a skeptic, and when my universe turned upside down, he was the first one to support me, despite the ration of shit I’d given him for years. I didn’t deserve friends that good.

“He was fine last night,” I repeated. “What happened?” Close mouth, Joanne, and engage brain. I pressed my lips shut, inhaled deeply through my nose, and said, “I’ll get dressed. Did Mel want me there?”

Morrison gave me a sour look and followed me to my bedroom door. I could see the tension in his shoulders as he folded his arms and leaned on the wall, ostentatiously turning his gaze toward the living room. I hesitated, then left the door open, since Morrison clearly intended to keep having a conversation while I was getting dressed. “I—”

“Joanne, will someone else be—oh, Captain Morrison.” Mark’s question overrode Morrison’s answer, and I wished, just briefly, that I was still in the living room so I could see Morrison’s expression. “Mark Bragg,” Mark said cheerfully. I had never heard anybody so cheerful in the morning. Especially someone whom I thought should be suffering from the same kind of brain-pounding headache that I was. He had, after all, shared in the aspirin I’d taken. Maybe his had worked better. “We met yesterday afternoon at the picnic,” he went on. “Barbara Bragg’s my sister.”

“Sure,” Morrison said in such a controlled voice I winced to hear it. “I remember. Nice to see you again, Mark.”

“Mommy, it’s a peace captain!” I heard Ashley come tearing out of the kitchen and looked toward the door in time to see her skid to a stop about six inches from Morrison, beaming up at him. “Hullo! I’m Ashley! Ossifer Walker is going to show me her school! I mean her work.” She wrinkled up her face until her nose looked like a button at the midst of a bunch, then smoothed it out again to smile adoringly at my boss. Her mother came out of the kitchen after her, offering a smile with a hint of apology for Ashley’s enthusiasm.

Morrison couldn’t take it anymore and shot me an incredulous look through my bedroom door. Fortunately for both of us I’d at least pulled on a pair of pants and had managed to get a bra in place. “Did I come at a bad time, Walker?” Sarcasm abounded so mildly that I wasn’t sure anyone else heard it.

“No, sir.” I was standing in my own bedroom half dressed calling a man sir. It really seemed like I ought to at least get laid, if I was doing that.

Then Mark stepped into view, his jeans still falling off his hips, and I remembered that all appearances indicated I had. Dammit. “Why don’t you go ahead and make everybody else some breakfast, Mark,” I muttered. “Since everyone’s here and all. Morrison and I have to go.” I pulled a white T-shirt on because I knew it would set off my tan and went to crouch in the doorway so I could talk to Ashley.

“We’re going to have to reschedule, Ashley. This is my boss, Captain Morrison, and I have to go with him this morning.”

Disappointment flooded the kid’s face, although at the same time she shot a conniving look at Morrison. “Maybe I could come with you!” All the guile was gone from her expression by the time she started speaking, big blue eyes full of hope and charm. I choked on a laugh. Even Morrison cracked a grin, proving he wasn’t entirely immune to feminine wiles.

But his voice was very serious as he answered, “’Fraid not, Ashley.” He crouched, too, so our knees knocked together, and gave Ashley all the respect due an adult. “Officer Walker and I have to take care of some police business by ourselves. But when Officer Walker gets the chance to reschedule and bring you to the station, come by my office and I’ll see if I can’t scare up a case for you to work on, all right?”

I thought the girl was going to lift right off the floor from so much delight and pride. “Okay!” She darted back to her mother to say, “Captain Morrison’s going to make me a police ossifer, Mommy! With a case for my own! I’m going to be a peace captain when I grow up!”

“I’m sure you will be, Ashley,” Allison Hampton said with the fond patience of a parent who heard at least a half-dozen different when I grow ups a day.

Morrison put his hands on his thighs and pushed himself upright, a quiet hint of a smile on his mouth. I looked up at him for a few seconds, trying to hide my own half smile.

I liked to think of Morrison as my personal bane of existence, the end-all and be-all of rigidity and things I didn’t like about cops. We shared a years-old antagonistic relationship that stemmed from me knowing a lot more about cars than he did—although honestly, I still couldn’t comprehend how someone could possibly mistake a Mustang for a Corvette—and which had developed into long-running habitual disagreement on any given topic. But the truth was I respected my captain, and he regularly pulled off little coups like the one with Ashley that made it clear to me that he deserved the captaincy he held, even if he didn’t know a damned thing about cars.

I took my gaze away from Morrison and caught Gary looking at me with the faintest smirk in the world. He wiped it off so fast I knew I’d read it correctly, making me hunch my shoulders and scowl as I straightened out of my crouch.

“I’m sorry,” I said to everybody in general, except Morrison. “I’ve got to go. Gary, I’ll call you when I’m done.”

Gary’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up. “You mean I ain’t goin’ with you?”

“No.” Morrison bristled so much I suspected Gary’d asked just to get a rise out of him. “You’re not.”

I couldn’t get the cabbie to meet my eyes and confirm his intentions, though. Instead, Gary gave Morrison a toothy white smile and asked, “Then who’s gonna drum her under?”

Every hair on my body stood up, until I felt like a spooked cat. Morrison’s expression went tight, as if he’d been caught out. I thought he probably had been. Gary’s smile stayed toothy. I found myself staring at the floor, feeling like looking at one or the other would be playing favorites in some kind of weird male rivalry thing that I didn’t understand.

“I will,” Morrison said. He didn’t sound happy about it, and cold lay down all over my arms and spine. I started to say, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Captain,” but he fixed me with a gimlet glare.

“It’ll be fine, Walker. Where’s your drum?”

I was pretty sure being drummed under by somebody with Morrison’s temperament and opinion about my abilities—which were pretty much on par with my own—wasn’t really fine, but Allison was looking at me curiously, and I very much didn’t want to get into it with her there. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “In there. On the dresser.”

Morrison walked into my bedroom like he’d done it a hundred times, while I gave Ashley and Allison another apologetic smile. “Monday and Tuesdays are my days off. We could reschedule for next we-eek?” My voice broke on the last word as I felt Morrison pick my drum up, a startling gentle caress that ran over my stomach like he was brushing the instrument’s surface. Warmth spread through me, up and down, and I put my hand on the door frame for balance as I looked back at my captain.

He held the drum like it was valuable, which it was. An elder in Qualla Boundary had made it for me, the only thing I’d even been given in my life that was unique and for me alone. It had a raven dyed into the soft deer leather, its wings sheltering a rattlesnake and a wolf. The stick that went with it had a knotted leather end and a rabbit-fur end that was dyed raspberry red. It meant more to me than any other possession I’d ever owned. Gary usually drummed for me, when I needed its music to go into a healing trance.

Gary picking up my drum had never given me a visceral thrill that made me consider locking myself in my bedroom with him. I swallowed on a surprisingly dry throat and Morrison looked up, expression so mild it was neutral. Either he wasn’t getting the same kind of thrill I was from him handling the drum, or he was hiding it very well. I bet on the former and swallowed again, turning back to Ashley and Allison. “Would that be okay?” My voice croaked, but no one seemed to notice.

Allison nodded and Ashley bounced up and down in enthusiastic agreement. That in hand, I looked beyond them at Mark. I had no idea what to say to Mark. I desperately didn’t want Mark to still be here when I came home. I’d be happier if Mark had never been there at all, but unless I could turn back time, that didn’t seem a likely scenario. I had a horror of going near him, for fear he’d try something unforgivably intimate, like kissing me goodbye. I’d have to break his lovely nose.

“Make sure the door’s locked when you leave,” I said after a few seconds. It seemed to cover all bases: it said I expected him to be gone, and I thought it didn’t leave room for Morrison to infer that Mark had a key to my apartment, which “Lock the door when you leave” might have.

Not that I cared what Morrison thought of my love life.

I slid a pair of sandals on and went out the door before anybody could say anything else.



Morrison followed on my heels, his gaze making the skin between my shoulder blades itch. He didn’t say anything, which was worse by far than questions. Even, “You had a party and didn’t invite me?” would have been nice. Something I could snap back at and therefore restore my shattered equilibrium. But Morrison wasn’t obliging me, no doubt on the warped logic that my personal life wasn’t his business. Never mind that if he said one word, that’s exactly what I’d tell him. That wasn’t the point, dammit.

“Mel asked for me?” I asked again, as much to shut my thoughts up as to break the silence. We cornered at a landing—I lived on the fifth floor in the same apartment building I’d been in since college—and I shot a cautious glance over my shoulder at the captain. He looked like he’d bitten into a sour grapefruit, not, once I thought about it, that I’d ever encountered a genuinely sweet one.

“No.”

“So what’re you doing here?” Somewhere in the midst of the sentence I figured it out and wished I hadn’t asked, because it meant Morrison had to answer.

“You’re supposed to have a knack for fixing this kind of problem,” he growled, and I wished some more I hadn’t asked. It hadn’t been all that long ago that Morrison and I had shared a healthy disrespect for the whole concept of other worlds and mystical healing and things like magic. That it was all malarkey had been the one thing we agreed on.

Empirical evidence had changed my stance, even if I’d spent most of the time since then resisting it with every fiber of my being. Morrison had been treated to an overwhelming load of first and secondhand proof that ranged from watching me come back from the dead to Billy Holliday’s house being all but destroyed by a demon I’d unleashed on Seattle. He was not a man to disbelieve his own eyes, but it was possible he hated it even more than I did.

But he was also too smart and too good a police captain not to use the assets he had available. If Billy was suffering from an inexplicable medical condition, then Joanne Walker, Reluctant Shaman, was the right person to come to. Whether Morrison liked it or not, he was putting his faith in the esoteric abilities I’d proved to have. I didn’t deserve his trust.

And I hoped he wasn’t making a mistake. Two weeks of crash-course training—much of which had been spent desperately searching for my spirit guide, who’d disappeared during that whole demon incident—was likely to be worth diddly. I was still working on instinct, which had turned out to be a messy way of life.

“That thing with Ashley,” I said, too loudly and too abruptly. “Is that how you ended up wanting to be a cop? Somebody gave you the time of day when you were a kid?” We hit the July sunlight as I asked the question, me squinting against it as I forged into the parking lot. Morrison caught up with me in two steps and cast me a sideways look that said he knew I was changing the subject and it was just fine with him.

“You think there had to be some kind of life-changing event that made me want to be a police officer? Just because it’s not your cup of tea, Walker…”

“It’s just that I never met a guy so obsessed with growing up to be a cop he couldn’t take time to learn the difference between a Mustang and a Corvette.” I reached the Mustang in question and strode around to the driver’s side while Morrison shot me a look of horror.

“We are not taking your muscle car, Walker. I’m driving.”

“I hate other people driving, and you always drive when we go somewhere together.” Crime scenes and funerals. Morrison knew how to show a girl a good time. “I bet you’ve never even ridden in a Mustang before, and besides, Morrison, I mean, come on, give me a break. Your car sucks.”

He looked affronted. “It’s got the highest safety ranking in its class. And the back end of yours is bashed in.”

“Like I said.” I jangled my keys at him, exasperated. “Look, you can drive yourself if you want, but I’m taking Petite. Come on. Live a little, mon capitán.” I leaned forward to put my hand on Petite’s purple roof and murmured, “It’s okay, baby. You’re not bashed in. Just a little dinged up. It’s not that he doesn’t like you. He just doesn’t know you like I do.” Honestly, Morrison was right. Petite’s rear end was smashed up, ugly but not disabling, due to having fallen down a fissure opened up by an earthquake. That wouldn’t be so bad, except I’d caused the earthquake.

Okay, it would have sucked every bit as much, but being the epicenter of a world-shattering event that racked my car up made it just that much worse. Petite had survived, and her calm steel soul wasn’t concerned about the depleted bank account that had already paid for one vehicular disaster this year. She was sure I’d make her as beautiful as she’d once been, and she was right. I whispered that promise as if she could hear me, and patted her roof a second time.

“Walker, your relationship with your vehicle is pathological.” Morrison glanced down the parking lot at his staid Toyota Avalon and sighed. I beamed and unlocked Petite’s door, giving her another pat as I swung into the driver’s seat.

“See?” I said as I unlocked the passenger door for my boss. “Nobody can resist you, baby. Not even the Mighty Morrison.”

“The what?” I’d never seen anybody look so awkward getting into a car before. Morrison sat down in the leather seat as if he was afraid it might bite him, and put the drum carefully into the back. “Walker, does this thing even have safety belts?”

“Click it or ticket, sir,” I quipped. “I put them in myself. Just for you. Even though she’s a classic and strictly speaking I didn’t have to.” I pulled my own seat belt on and waited for Morrison to get his on before adding, “I figure anything that goes a hundred and fifty oughta have ’em, after all.”

Morrison turned pale. I grinned and pulled out of the parking lot too fast, feeling pretty chipper despite the hangover, Billy’s condition and Mark.




CHAPTER FOUR


Once upon a time, the antiseptic smell of hospitals gave me sneezing fits every time I went in one. The past month I’d been in and out of them often enough that the sneezing had reduced itself to just feeling like somebody’d stuffed plugs up my nose, making my eyes tingle and water. It wasn’t much of an improvement, and I really wanted to just not have to go into hospitals at all anymore.

The universe was supremely indifferent to what I wanted. I rubbed my nose and followed Morrison up to an ordinary hospital room, not the intensive-care unit I was expecting. Billy Holliday was, by all appearances, sleeping comfortably in a bed that looked too small for his barrel-chested frame. There was an oxygen sensor on one finger, and monitors I couldn’t identify beeped in the background. He looked fine.

His wife, on the other hand, looked like hell. I’d only seen Melinda Holliday look less than lovely once previously, during the demon-in-her-kitchen episode a couple of weeks earlier, but the one-two punch seemed to have taken the spark out of her. Her dark hair was in a listless ponytail, olive skin drawn and pale and she wasn’t dressed to disguise early signs of pregnancy. Since I’d been admonished not to mention she was pregnant for several weeks yet, I knew she was worried: Mel wasn’t the kind of woman who would accidentally dress badly, or let show something she wanted kept private.

Morrison stopped in the doorway and let me go in ahead of him. Or maybe he made me go in ahead of him, but either way, I went in as he hung back in the door frame. Mel looked up and blatant relief swept her expression, tears bright in her brown eyes. “Joanie. Michael said he’d get you on his way over. I’m so glad you’re here.” She got herself around the bed and over to hug me as she spoke, while I stumbled over the idea of someone calling Morrison by his given name. I knew he had one, of course, but it was the mental equivalent of Babe Ruth saying, “Hiya, King!” to King Edward of England.

I wasn’t sure who would find it more appalling that I was putting Morrison on the same pedestal as British royalty: Morrison, or the English. Fortunately, it was a thought that would never escape the confines of my mind.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I said to the top of Melinda’s head. “Billy’s going to be fine. What happened?”

Mel extracted herself from the hug, stepping back with her chin lifted, a way of instigating control over her emotions. “I don’t know. He just wouldn’t wake up this morning. The doctors said his vitals are strong and he seems to be in REM sleep, but he just won’t wake up.”

“I’ll do what I can, Mel. I’m not all that good at this.” I sat down at Billy’s side, trying not to gnaw on my lower lip.

“You’ll help him.” She went back to her seat on the other side of the bed, taking Billy’s hand. I bit my lip after all and looked over my shoulder at Morrison.

He leaned in the door frame, arms folded across his chest as he stared at me so intently I felt a blush crawling up my cheeks. My drum dangled from his fingertips, against his ribs, like he’d forgotten it was there, though I was certain he hadn’t. He was waiting for something, and I knew both what and why. I almost couldn’t blame him.

Morrison had never actually been present when I’d tried healing someone before, though he’d been in the vicinity and had seen the evidence of success after the fact. Proof didn’t make him happy about my talents, and I could feel discomfort rolling off him in waves. It wasn’t any especial attunement to emotion or altered states of being that let me feel it, either, just his glower and the tightness of his shoulders.

“Mel could drum me under,” I offered. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear—he wanted to be told none of this was necessary—but it was the best I could do. By getting me here he’d already pushed well past the boundaries of what he considered reasonable behavior. It wasn’t the first time he’d forced his own hand into asking what my esoteric gifts might be able to come up with, but it was the first time he’d found himself playing an actively supporting role.

I had complete and total sympathy with the not wanting to be there for it. I’d have checked out myself, if I could’ve, although that impulse was slowly being replaced by a grim determination to just get this shamanism thing right. A wash of regret burbled through me, leaving weary sadness behind. “You don’t have to do this, Captain.”

“Yeah, I do.” Morrison shoved off the doorjamb, making it creak. I startled at his contrary agreement, then found myself staring at the man.

I tended to think I was Morrison’s size because I was Morrison’s height, but seeing him framed in the doorway reminded me why I also tended to think of him as an aging superhero. The summer heat had taken some of the extra flesh he’d been carrying from around his middle, so the aging part seemed to slip away, leaving just the hero behind. His hair needed cutting, which was the sort of thing I rarely noticed on myself, much less anyone else, but the marginally longer length played up silver streaks that in turn emphasized just how damned blue his eyes were. I wished, very abruptly, that we were at the office and he was in his usual two-piece suit instead of shirtsleeves, so I’d just see my boss, instead of a man.

I turned back to Billy with my shoulders hunched, just in time to catch Melinda’s pursed-lip look of curiosity before she schooled it into neutrality. My shoulders went higher, and Morrison came up behind me, dragging a chair to the foot of Billy’s bed. I heard the door click shut as he sat down, the drum held awkwardly but carefully in one hand. “Heartbeat rhythm, right?”

I looked back at him and he shrugged. “People talk, Walker. Especially about you.”

Millipedes stampeded up and down my spine, leaving me with shivers and a bump of nausea in my stomach. “I wish you hadn’t said that.” I knew on some level that people talked about me. It was clear from the way offices or the garage beneath the station would get quiet when I came in, and from how guys I’d once considered friends wouldn’t quite look at me anymore. Having it said out loud, though, was a lot different from knowing it.

Morrison, bless his sensitive soul, said, “Too bad,” and knocked a heartbeat thump into my drum.

The world lit up as if a few thousand angels had dropped by for afternoon tea. Gold splattered my vision, fading to lens flares of white and peach before clarity reasserted itself.

And what clarity it was, going far beyond the normal solidity of day-to-day life. A second sight descended over mine, giving the room, the sunlight in the window, the three people with me, everything, a depth that made normal vision seem weak and meaningless. Even the hospital walls glowed with purpose, vibrant green telling me they held their place as a hall of healing and took pride in that. Dust motes in the air glittered like star stuff, and I knew that if I got up to look out the window, there would be neon-bright colors flooding the streets, purposeful vitality making up all the aspects of the world. Every time I looked around me with the second sight, a part of me wanted to never let it go. Doing so ached inside of me, as if the overblown beauty visible through a layer of magic was how everything ought to be seen. Like I was cutting myself off from something important, when I looked at things with an ordinary woman’s vision.

I’d never really seen Morrison through these eyes, though I’d felt his colors a few times, deep blues and purples that spoke of reassurance and confidence about his place in the world. Looking at him now, I could see red tingeing the edges of his aura, confirming his irritation in participating in this—charade wasn’t the right word, and not even he thought so. Escapade. It was only that, though: irritation. There was no deep coil of red through his colors, nothing that poisoned his drumming against what I wanted to accomplish with Billy. As I watched, discoloration roiled through, shading blue toward a sickly green and purples into murky reds. He couldn’t have said Get on with it, Walker, any more clearly if he’d spoken aloud. My shoulders flinched back and I looked across the bed at Mel.

Sunlight from the window behind her was captured in her hair, streams of fire that helped lighten an orange-streaked yellow aura that lay flat against her skin. That wasn’t right: when I’d last seen Mel’s colors, they’d danced and swirled around her, even in the midst of a very bad situation. That they were dulled and drained now worried me. I reached across Billy to take her hand.

Power poured into me, unrelenting as a river delta. I blinked twice, each blink bringing my second sight deeper into Melinda’s aura, until I could see what she was doing. A ball of sunlight was collected over her heart, drawing all her surface colors down into it. Orange and yellow ran against the flow of blood, pulling in from her skin to become ever-more intense as it neared her heart. Once there, she pushed it outward, toward Billy. Billy’d made a similar offering to me a few months earlier, lending his strength to my own so I could try to defeat a banshee before it killed again.

But the life force Melinda was pouring into her husband wasn’t helping him stay alive. I kept one hand over Melinda’s and put the other over Billy’s heart, turning my focus down to him. His colors were fuchsia and orange, oddly complementary to Melinda’s, and I could feel that they were locked up tight, kept in the psychic equivalent of a strongbox. A trickle escaped, but not to keep his heart beating and mind functioning. It felt as if it was being drained, a pinhole leak that something was feeding from. The thinnest fraction of that was allowed to divert and keep him alive, like a vampire that knew perfectly well it would die if its food source did.

Right now, though, Billy wasn’t providing the real food source. Melinda’s sunshine strength was being swallowed whole by lethargic blackness that had a heavier feeling to it than death. Death held a remoteness to it, a star-spangled void that didn’t carry burdens; but the darkness that held Billy felt like sleep. It was laden with dreams and portent, pressing down like night paralysis, as if it wanted something. Death, in my experience, didn’t want. It just took.

“Melinda.” I wasn’t quite sure I was talking out loud, but she looked up, dark eyes shining with too little light. “Mel, you have to stop it,” I said quietly. “You’re exhausting yourself, and if you keep doing this it’ll be bad for the baby.” I could see the baby’s cheerful rose-colored glow, still safe from the power drain Melinda was putting on herself, but with the way she shed energy, it was a matter of time before the baby started to suffer. “You have to stop. You’re not helping Billy by doing this. You’re helping whatever’s done this to him.”

Disbelief, then rage, flashed in Melinda’s eyes before the stream of power cut off so sharply I felt blinded for a moment. I lifted a hand to my eyes, shaking my head, and mumbled, “You’re going to have to teach me how to do that. Jesus.”

She gave me a very faint smile. “Later.” Melinda, like Billy, was not only comfortable with the world of the paranormal, but had sought it out. She’d told me once she and Billy had met at a paranormal activities conference, and that her grandmother had been a bruja, a witch. I would have snorted up my sleeve at such an admission a year ago, but as my life had grown increasingly weird, I’d discovered a couple of things. One was that more people than I’d have ever imagined believed in a mystical world that complemented our own.

The other was that I was desperately grateful for those friends who didn’t think I was insane, especially when I’d been less than generous in my opinions about their sanity before my own world had turned upside down.

“Morrison?” I was half afraid to turn my head to look at the captain. My grip on second sight was usually so tenuous that moving my physical body while trying to hold on to it was a work of vast concentration.

On the other hand, when Morrison had begun the drumbeat, something abnormal had happened. It usually took at least a breath or two before I could slide into another state of consciousness. I generally had to wrestle with deliberate acceptance, with choosing, to exit what I was learning to think of as the Middle World, and I always had to struggle to hold on to the shaky ability to see auras and energies. I did not slam into double vision and healing trances with no time to blink. Maybe I was getting better at this.

Or maybe it had something to do with Morrison.

I made myself look at him instead of pursuing that thought. He hadn’t stopped drumming, although he looked far more uncomfortable with it than Gary ever had. A twinge of unhappiness sailed through me as I wished it was Gary doing the drumming. His enthusiasm for whatever weird shit I was about to get myself, and him, into, somehow made it easier. “Think you can keep that up for about fifteen minutes?”

Morrison’s mouth pulled into a sour twist. “Pretty sure I can handle it. If I start getting carpal tunnel I’ll let Melinda pick it up.”

I stuck my tongue out, feeling more like an e-mail emoticon expressing exasperation than a person making a face at my boss. Morrison looked completely taken aback, which I found surprisingly satisfying. I went with the victory and turned back to Billy. “Give me fifteen minutes, and then stop. I should wake right up.”

“And if you don’t?”

Visceral memory shot through me, the warmth of Morrison’s hand on my shoulder just before a monster from another realm of reality had eaten me for lunch. The touch had saved my life, although Morrison sure as hell didn’t know that, and I really didn’t like thinking about it.

“Then put your hand on my bare skin,” I muttered. Mel, whose hand I still held, lifted our hands, and then her eyebrows. I glanced up long enough to meet her gaze, then looked away, remembering Phoebe’s insistence that she’d shaken me repeatedly, trying to wake me, but that I’d flinched back into wakefulness the instant my boss touched me.

“It has to be Morrison.” I could barely hear myself through the mumbles, and try as I might I didn’t miss Melinda’s slow smile or the glance she gave the police captain at the end of the bed. I sighed and straightened my spine, trying to concentrate on the drumbeat and nothing else. I wasn’t sure where to begin with bringing Billy out of his sleep, but sitting around feeling embarrassed that I had a cru—

The door behind me banged open, preventing me, thankfully, from finishing that thought, and an incredulous voice demanded, “What in the hell is going on in here?”




CHAPTER FIVE


Next time I get handed an exciting new power set, I want it to include a Spidey sense that warns me of oncoming danger. Or, in this case, oncoming doctors. I yanked my hands away from Billy like a guilty pickpocket. Morrison stopped drumming, and true to my word, my second sight fell away in a rush. Disorientation buzzed over me and I shoved to my feet, wondering why normality felt so wrong. I saw Melinda come to her feet, too, but the doctor was scowling at Morrison. “What,” he demanded again, “the hell is going on in here?”

That offended me on all kinds of levels. First off, any questions about what was going on ought to have been addressed to Melinda, as the ill man’s spouse. Second, while Morrison did have the drum, and I could see how that made him the instigator in the doctor’s eyes, I was the one who’d been doing the laying-on of hands. I might not like my powers, but I wasn’t by God going to let somebody else get blamed for them. Especially not Morrison, who’d taken enough on the chin this morning.

Third, the guy simply hit all my arrogant-prick medical-professional buttons. He stalked across the room in his white doctor’s coat and put his hand out for the drum. A heavy ring with a yellow stone glittered on his hand, making the gesture all the more imperious and insulting. I thrust myself between him and Morrison like a knife, glowering. Morrison’s chair scraped on the floor as he pushed it back, but to my surprise, he didn’t stand.

The doctor looked up his nose at me. I had at least two inches on him, so he couldn’t, try as he might, look down his nose at me. I gave him my very best, politest, most friendly, cheerful smile, and the wonderful thing was, I genuinely meant it. It was one of those rare, beautiful moments when I really loved every inch of my nearly six foot height, not to mention the shoulders and arms that came with spending a lifetime working on cars. I might’ve been slender next to my boss, but I wasn’t exactly a waif, and once in a while looming over officious jerks in an imposing manner was incredibly satisfying. “I’m sorry, Doctor, is something wrong?”

His nostrils flared and he backed up a step. I showed tremendous restraint and didn’t follow him. His expression suggested he’d stepped back of his own free will so he could see me better. My neighbor’s cat got that same kind of expression when he fell off the windowsill: I wanted to be on the floor. I smiled some more.

“This is Mrs. Holliday. Oh, you’ve met,” I said into the sour face of acknowledgment he made, and before he could actually get a word in edgewise. “So I’m sure you understand that whatever’s going on in here is happening with her approval, which makes it, let me see, what’s the phrase I’m looking for here. Oh, yeah. None of your goddamned business.”

He inhaled. I pointed a finger at him and he coughed on his words. “Does it appear to you that anyone in this room is providing illegal medical advice, or in fact trying to remove Mr. Holliday from the hospital’s expert care?”

He inhaled again. I thought if I could keep him doing this for a few minutes, he might just puff up and blow away like a hot air balloon. It was worth a shot, so I carried on full bore. “I didn’t think so. I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of positive thoughts and prayer shoring up the ill, Doctor, even if you don’t subscribe to its usefulness yourself.” His nose pinched again and I smiled less pleasantly this time. “That’s what I thought. But you’d hardly deny the family and friends of an ill man the chance to surround him with those thoughts and prayers, would you? I didn’t think so.” Somewhere in the middle of that I started walking toward him, and he started backing up. By the time I got to the end, I was smiling so hard it hurt, and he was on the wrong side of the door that I closed in his face. I turned back to Melinda and Morrison, triumph writ large in my expression.

“That,” Melinda said, “was Bill’s older brother.”



It turned out ritual suicide wasn’t an option while hanging out in a friend’s hospital room. Morrison wouldn’t even let me crawl under Billy’s bed and hide in humiliation. Billy’s brother—who, now that I knew was his brother, did bear some resemblance to him, in a shrunken-down, weasly kind of way—gave me the world’s flattest look and then ignored me wholesale when he came back into the room. I not only couldn’t blame him, I was sort of grateful.

Bradley Holliday had driven up from Spokane the moment his shift at Valley Hospital ended, which was why he wore doctor’s whites. On hearing he was from Spokane, I wanted to know any number of things, like why I hadn’t known Billy had a brother, if he lived nearby and whether or not Bradley Holliday had ever met a teenage girl named Suzanne Quinley who’d gone to live in Spokane after her parents were brutally murdered. I figured the answers were “You never asked,” and “No,” respectively, but I wondered, anyway.

I also wondered why my friend Billy, who loved all things paranormal and who had married a woman like himself, had a brother who became livid at a healer’s drum in a hospital room.

I sat down on the far side of Billy’s bed, making myself as small as possible while I put a hand on his shoulder. It hardly mattered: none of the others were paying any attention to me, but I felt like I needed to be surreptitious, anyway.

The coil of energy flared inside me as I touched Billy’s shoulder, impatience sparkling through my skin like champagne. I felt a knot loosen in my shoulder and let my eyes close for a moment, absurdly grateful that the power was responding. It hadn’t been a couple of weeks earlier, and although it’d been behaving since then, the idea of failing my friends again made my stomach clench with nausea.

In a way it was helpful to have Brad over there talking intently with Melinda and Morrison. It put less pressure on me to be the performing monkey, and I was uncertain enough about what to do as it was. I did know one thing: pouring my life essence into Billy, like Melinda had tried to do, was right out. She didn’t have the healing knack that I did, but that hadn’t been the important part of what she’d been offering. She’d been trying to give him the will to live, and Billy wasn’t missing that. What I’d felt was more like a siphon draining away what would have normally made him vital.

And siphons were a metaphor I could work with. The idea brought a smile to my lips even as I concentrated on my breathing, unwilling to interrupt and bring attention to myself by asking for my drum. Ideally I would pop by the garden that housed my inner self, invite Billy in and do a little fixer-upper from there. Even more ideally, I’d pop right into Billy’s garden and do my work from inside his own head, but the one time I’d fallen into somebody else’s garden, it’d been Gary, and I didn’t really have much idea of how I’d done it. I suspected I hadn’t done it at all, in fact, and that the old man’s sense of self had just overwhelmed my newbie attempts to set up his shop in my head. It all meant that realistically, I was going to try slipping inside my garden, drawing Billy’s soul closer to mine and pinching off the siphon that was drawing life force out of him. It seemed very straightforward and simple.

Oh, what my life had come to, that such things should seem simple.

A few deep breaths had me drifting, like the clarity Morrison’s drumming had brought on was simmering just below the surface, waiting for me to pay attention to it again. My goal this time was an internal journey, not an external one, so there was no lens flare effect or rearrangement of the color spectrum into neons and pulsing life. Instead I slid down a brightly colored rabbit hole, tumbling chaotically through my own mind into a place I didn’t recognize at first.

There were familiar elements. The pond with a waterfall feeding it at one end, for example, and the pathways that lay in straight lines through the grounds. But the grass, usually cropped so short I could see dirt between individual blades, had grown up to ankle-deep, and there was a hint of Kentucky blue to its color now. Leaves were fully open on trees that were still tidily trimmed, and a few of the hedges even bore flowers, though I had no idea what kind. The garden had been rectangular and functional last time I’d been in it, but now the far end, away from the waterfall, seemed hazy, as if fog were hiding the possibility of more.

It was almost pretty.

I stood by the pond, rotating slowly and trying to remember when I’d last actually gone inside myself. I’d been looking outward for days, searching for Coyote—my erstwhile spirit guide, who’d stopped speaking to me after I threw him out of a dangerous situation—but I’d been avoiding taking a look at the state of my soul ever since the catastrophe that had cost two people their lives. It seemed unlikely that those events had led to all the blossoming going on around me now.

Of course not, said a snide little voice inside my head. Because horrible things happening couldn’t possibly have any positive aspects, like forcing you to get your act together.

I really hated that voice. I was almost certain it’d been there before my shamanic powers had been woken up. It was the almost part that made me nervous. Sometimes I wanted to ask if other people had snarky little voices that gave them smart-ass commentary on their lives, but I was afraid they’d say no.

Obnoxious little voice or no, I sat down by my pond, trailing my fingers into the water. It struck me suddenly as being a good conduit for reaching Billy, even working into the siphoning of life essence he was experiencing. I could still feel my hand on his shoulder, in a vague, disconnected way, which was interesting. I’d never tried paying attention to my physical body while inside the garden of my mind. Then again, I hadn’t really needed to, and now I was trying to build a bridge between myself and my patient. Trying to find a way inside him so we could get the healing process started.

It was my right hand both on his shoulder and splooshing around in my pond. The most peculiar thing was that having two body awarenesses going on at once only sounded strange when I tried putting it into words; it felt completely natural. I turned my focus to my fingers, calling up the bubble of power that resided inside me.

It responded as easily as it had before, splashing through me in silver-blue joy at being used. Warmth and glee ran up through my torso and into my arm, washing down the blood vessels just as it had done with Gary, and then poured itself into my pond. The charged water glimmered and shone, quicksilver with life and depth of its own. My consciousness spilled into it, and over Billy’s skin, making me aware of his heartbeat, his breathing, first on the surface, and then slowly from within, as if he was permeable and I was water.

I cut the snide little voice off before it could comment, that time. I knew perfectly well the permeation was what I was trying to accomplish, but it didn’t make succeeding any less surprising to me. Still, having my brain back-talk at me when I was trying to concentrate couldn’t be of any help.

The entire sensation was incredibly subtle, like being brushed by fur so soft I couldn’t be sure I’d been touched. It could also have been insanely erotic, and for a moment I was torn between gratitude I was working with Billy and a fantasy about working with Morrison.

God, I wished I would stop thinking things like that. I set my teeth together both literally and figuratively, and concentrated on the idea of permeating my way through flesh and bone and into Billy’s psyche, so I could enter the garden of his soul and work my anti-siphoning magic.

For a minute there, I thought it was going to work. I slid through dreams, trying not to look at them, under the unlikely logic that they weren’t my business. Traipsing around in people’s unconscious minds: my business. Snooping while I’m doing it: not kosher. I had an interesting set of moral boundaries going on there.

But the water metaphor was working, letting me drain down toward his garden. I got the impression that the idea of the garden was something I superimposed on Billy, and that he adapted to because I was the one awake in this scenario. Regardless, it provided the structure I needed, a bright spot at the center of his being, hints of green visible even from my outside vantage point. I exhaled a sigh of relief.

Warm, heavy blackness came down around his garden like a Carolina night, so thick and dark there was nothing left to breathe. There were faint shining prisms in the black, ripples of purple and blue that had the faintest living texture to them when I saw them from the corners of my eyes, and which disappeared entirely when I looked straight at them, too dark to be seen.

My water metaphor held together, leaving me beading against tar, unable to push through the darkness. I gnawed my lower lip, wondering which level of reality I was doing that on, and tried to pull the droplets of myself back together, coalescing into a whole presence lingering within Billy’s mind as a semi-welcome guest.

Sleepy, weighty midnight swam around me, trying as hard—harder—than I was to enter that core of Billy’s self. It brought slow pressure to bear, something about its presence suggesting it had all the time it needed, and that it would eventually prevail. I, on the other hand, was beginning to think I had a limited window in which to save my friend’s life. The sleepy power didn’t seem to be interested in acknowledging me, and I couldn’t tell if Billy knew I was there. If my water metaphor had failed, there had to be another way. Something more direct, something completely the opposite of what the weight that kept Billy asleep was trying to accomplish.

A needle sounded good. I restructured the idea of my approach without putting too much thought into it, half afraid I’d tip something off if I was too noisy about my intentions. Coyote had told me more than once that the psychic planes were dangerous places, and while I felt relatively safe in the confines of Billy’s head, he probably had, too, and now he was stuck in a coma. I made the idea of myself thin, piercing through the uncomprehending darkness with ease as I injected myself toward Billy’s garden. One pinprick hole to carry a healing element into the garden. It made sense.

I smacked into a barrier hard enough to make my head ring and landed back in my own body, holding a hand over my eye. “Ow.”

“Walker?” Morrison was beside me, his hand hovering over my shoulder. I moved my fingers away from my face, brushing his touch away before it happened.

“I’m okay.” My left eye socket hurt. Not like the hangover, which I’d managed to forget about, but as if I’d been smacked with a ball. Or like a needle tip had hit bone instead of forgiving flesh. “I’m all right.” I put my hand over my eye again, squinting the other one at Melinda. “Mel, I think I should talk to you.” I didn’t want to give Brad a significant look, but my squinty eye flashed to him, anyway. “Alone.”

Brad exhaled in noisy exasperation. “She’s one of your insane friends, isn’t she, Melinda?”

“Joanne Walker,” Morrison said in clipped tones, “is a police officer under my command. She is here because I asked her to be. If you have a problem with that, Dr. Holliday, you can take it up with me.”

I wanted to cheer Morrison or hug him or something equally inappropriate, but my mouth had broken into a wide grin and my tummy was jumping with barely contained jiggles of laughter. “Doc Holliday,” I said happily. “I mean, I never got why your parents were cruel enough to call Billy Billy instead of Will or William, but Doc Holliday you did to yourself.”

The look Morrison gave me suggested I wasn’t helping matters. The look Bradley Holliday gave me suggested he’d heard the joke several thousand times now and it wasn’t any funnier than it had been the first time. Me, I didn’t care. For one brief, shining moment, life was good. Still grinning, I turned to Melinda, and all my humor fell away at the scared look in her eyes. “Crap,” I said quietly, and looked at Brad again. “Can you give me a minute with Mel, please?”

“She’ll tell me whatever you tell her,” he said pompously. I glanced at Melinda, who shrugged and nodded. I shrugged, too.

“Okay. There’s something keeping him asleep. Something that’s trying to drain his life energy. You were feeding it with all that pow—” I glanced at Morrison and Brad, shrugged again and modified what I was saying to “—good will you were giving him. I could get through it, but I couldn’t get into Billy’s psyche. He can take care of himself.” I lifted my hand to my eye again, then let it fall. “His own shields kept me out, and they’re keeping that thing, whatever it is, from draining him dry, too. I’ve never had to get through somebody’s shields, Mel. I don’t know how to do it, but I can learn, and then between me and Billy we’ll get that leech off him. It’s going to be okay.”

Melinda began a nod, taking a quick breath to speak, but Bradley beat her to it with a growled “This is preposterous. Bill needs medical care, not a quack with a drum and a mouthful of new-age nonsense.”

Morrison scowled at me, clearly on Brad Holliday’s side of things. I sympathized with them both, which only made everything more complicated. “I’m sorry, Captain. If it was going to be easy, the doctors probably could’ve woken him up. But I’ll figure it out. I really will,” I promised, then offered a hopeful smile and added, “Look at it this way. At least nobody’s dead.”

Morrison’s cell phone rang.




CHAPTER SIX


I steepled my palms and fingers together against my mouth, fitted my thumbs under my chin and tried not to throw up. I had the distinct feeling I’d just made the at least it’s not raining comment on a much nastier scale, and from the tension throbbing in Morrison’s temple, he thought I had, too. For a few seconds the only sound in the room was the beeping of Billy’s monitors while we all watched Morrison pick up the call.

He tilted his head back and exhaled, shoulders slumping a little before he cast me an indecipherable glance and left the room with an apology on his lips for whoever it was he was talking to. Relief-tinged nausea settled into my bones and I put my head down on my knees and breathed for a minute. If somebody was dead, the look Morrison’d given me wouldn’t have been unreadable. I was willing to take small favors where I could get them. A shiver swept over me and I curled my arms around myself more tightly.

Melinda put her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, Joanie.”

I shook my head against my knees. “I didn’t do anything.”

Brad’s disgruntled “You certainly didn’t” came across the room in a mutter. Melinda ignored him, squeezing my shoulder.

“You’ll find a way to help him,” she said with quiet confidence. “And at least I’ve got something to tell the kids.”

“What,” Brad snapped, “that their father is being held captive by a psychic whammy? Melinda, you have got to start dealing with the real world here. Bill is in a coma and he may never wake up. These things aren’t caused by evil spirits and magic. It’s a physical condition and has to be treated with science and medical professionals, not voodoo and snake oil.”

I lifted my head to watch him rant, hands steepled against my mouth again. “We’re all worried, Dr. Holliday,” I said when he was done. “I know you’ve already lost one sibling.” Careless of him, my snide little voice said, but I didn’t let it out. Brad didn’t like me as it was. Joking about dead family wasn’t exactly the best way to win friends and influence people. “I hope the doctors can help him. In the meantime, maybe voodoo hoodwinks won’t hurt.” I could hardly believe I was hearing myself say that. How very far the mighty had fallen.

I stood up and gave Melinda a hug. “I’m going to head home and see if I can scare anything up about sleeping sicknesses and…” I trailed off with a sigh. And penetrating mental shields was how the sentence ended, but my coping mechanism had slid out of place, and it just seemed like too much to say right then. “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything, okay?”

“Okay.” Mel returned the hug and I heard the argument with Brad start up again as I left the hospital room.

Morrison was folding his phone closed as I came down the hall. “Everything all right, Captain? Who was on the phone?”

He gave me another look I couldn’t read. “Everything’s fine. Just a friend.”

“Tell your friend he’s got lousy timing,” I said.

“She,” Morrison said, then looked like he wished he hadn’t. A too-vivid mental picture of Barbara Bragg snagged in my mind and I closed my hands into fists. Morrison noticed and I tried to find something else to do with my hands. “What’s going on back there?” Morrison asked just a shade too loudly. I seized on it, grateful for any change of topic.

“Oh, you know.” I had something to do with my hands now, gesturing down the hall toward the elevators. Morrison went for the stairs, probably out of sheer contrariness, but I followed him anyway. “Brad’s back there trying to convince Mel it’s dangerous to let me within fifty yards of his brother, and she’s telling him that Billy isn’t Caroline, and that everything’s going to be all right.” My vast psychic powers didn’t actually include telepathy, but I figured it was a pretty good guess as to what was going on. Morrison cornered on the stairs and threw a furrow-browed glance back at me.

“Caroline?”

“Their sister. She drowned when Billy was a kid. He told me about it a few months ago.” He’d told me considerably more than that, the day after my powers had woken up. Caroline’s death and consequent visits had precipitated Billy’s fascination with the paranormal world. He didn’t see dead people all the time, the way the kid in the movie did, but he saw them often enough. It was why he’d become a homicide detective: the newly dead were sometimes able to point him toward their killers. I would not in a million years have believed him if I hadn’t spent the night before he told me talking to a bunch of dead shamans.

“I didn’t know.” Morrison pushed an exit door open, letting in brilliant July sunshine. I lifted a hand to protect my eyes as we went out to the parking lot.

“Funny what we don’t know about the people we work with.” I regretted saying it almost before the words were finished, and Morrison gave me a sharp look that said, as clearly as words might have, No kidding, Siobhán. I knotted my fists and muttered, “See what I mean?” at the pavement.

My real name wasn’t Joanne Walker. I’d been born Siobhán Walkingstick, names stuck on me by diversely ethnic parents. My father had taken one look at the Gaelic mess Siobhán and Anglicized it to Joanne, and I’d abandoned the Cherokee Walkingstick the day I graduated high school. Since then I hadn’t given much thought to either name, until dead shamans and old gods started calling me by it. I can be a little slow on the uptake, but I got the idea pretty fast that names had power, and my true name wasn’t something I wanted bandied about.

So, of course, I’d turned around and told it to Morrison. I’d say I was still trying to work my way through that, but I was more trying to pull the covers over my head and pretend it hadn’t happened. Apparently good ol’ Captain Morrison wasn’t going to let me forget. I wished he would. Regardless of the name printed on my birth certificate, Siobhán Walkingstick was someone who barely existed. I pushed myself into a jog for a few steps, pulling ahead of the captain as we headed for my car.

Sunlight glittered across her windshield, and for a moment I saw dozens of spiderweb cracks in it, radiating out from a hole that punched nearly all the way through. A surge of panic yanked my stomach downward, but when I blinked the damage was gone. I came up to the car and leaned on the hood, fingers splayed and knuckles popping against the heated metal as I breathed through my teeth. My head dropped between my shoulders, making my neck ache, but I just wanted to touch my Mustang and know she was all right. I could hear the frown and the concern in Morrison’s voice as he said, “Walker?”

“Nothing. Thought I saw a crack in the windshield.” I had. It just hadn’t precisely been Petite’s windshield that was cracked. It was, for lack of a better word, my soul. Every flaw I’d ever run away from was imprinted on a sheet of windshield glass, my mechanic-trade influence weighting the way I saw myself. A few times over the past six months some of those cracks had fused, but there were a whole hell of a lot more of them left to heal. I had a pretty good idea of what moment had left the puncture hole, and I wanted to keep as far away from that moment as possible. I didn’t like it when my little avoidance techniques threw the whole intertwined mess of my emotional state back in my face.

“…who cracked your windshield,” Morrison was saying. I cranked my head up and turned it toward him without comprehension. “I’d pity the poor bastard who cracked your windshield,” he repeated.

“Don’t. He walked away.” My lip curled against the words. Morrison’d been talking about my car, and I was talking about something else entirely. Something I didn’t want to talk about, I informed the inside of my head, so if my brain would like to cooperate and pass sentences through it first before they got to my mouth, I’d appreciate it.

Great. Now the snide little voice was me. Not that it wasn’t all the time, but this time it was actively me. Lecture given, I shoved off Petite’s hood. Morrison got between me and the driver’s-side door, not quite touching me, his eyebrows drawn down in concern.

“Walker?”

“Do me a favor, Morrison, and forget I said that, okay?”

“I’m not sure I should.”

“Dammit, boss. Please.” I turned my face away, looking at the wheel well of the car next to my Mustang. Someone had put hollowed-out, spinning hubcaps on a Subaru station wagon, which seemed a lot like gilding a potato peeler. “It’s not what you’re thinking, okay?” I said to the Subaru.

“Are you sure?”

I sighed, looking back at Morrison. Sunlight made his eyes a ridiculously clear blue, even as he squinted into it to see me better. “Yeah, Morrison, I’m sure.” I didn’t want to say the word we were both thinking. It was ugly and scary, and besides, it hadn’t happened, despite my horrible phrasing. I edged around it with “Nobody hurt me, I promise. Not physically. And who gets this far in life without some emotional scars, anyway, right?” I even managed to dredge up a crooked little smile, just because Morrison looked so damned concerned. If he’d been someone else—if I’d been someone else—I’d have put my hand on his cheek and kissed him for fussing. But we were both ourselves, so all I said was, “Okay?”

After a long silence he nodded and stepped back. “All right, Walker. If you say so.” He walked around Petite’s wrinkled back end while I unlocked my door and climbed into her oven-hot interior to unlock the passenger door. Morrison put the drum in the back again, and I pulled out of the parking lot, concentrating on driving so I didn’t have to talk. Morrison didn’t push it, and the ride went as it always did when he and I were in a vehicle together: in silence.

I was the one who broke it, as we climbed out of the car back at my apartment building. Morrison nodded as he got out, a dismissal if there ever was one, but I reached across Petite’s roof and said, “Captain.” He hesitated and curiosity won out, making him turn to look at me again. “Thanks for getting me this morning. I’m sorry I wasn’t more help with Billy, and I’m sorry if I made things awkward with his brother.”

A faint smile curled the corner of his mouth. “What do you want, Walker?”

I ducked my head and breathed a laugh. “Nothing. I just wanted to say thanks. And…” I made a fist of my hand and bounced it lightly against Petite’s roof, twice. “That’s all.” I met Morrison’s eyes with a brief smile and shook my head. “That’s all.”

He waited a long, long moment before nodding. “You’re welcome.”

I watched him walk away, wondering just how much research he’d done on me, after I’d confessed Joanne Walker wasn’t my real name. I knew he’d done some. I would have, too, in his position. I just didn’t know how much. Maybe the flash of concern had been because he knew a lot more about me than I thought anybody west of the Carolinas or north of the Mason-Dixon line did.

Or maybe it was because Morrison was a decent man and I’d chosen unfortunate words at the hospital parking lot.

Either way, I’d just let the best opportunity I might ever have to find out go, throttled by anxiety and my own unwillingness to talk, think or act on my past. Someday I was going to have to turn around and face all of the crap piling up behind me. A lot of people had told me that recently.

It was the first time I’d ever said it to myself, though.

I sighed, thumped Petite’s roof again, got my drum and went upstairs to see who was left in my apartment.

Tuesday, July 5, 11:40 a.m.

The answer was an anticlimactic nobody. There was a note from Mark on top of the box of doughnuts Gary’d brought, which said Maybe we could get to know each other in a less Biblical sense over dinner, and had a phone number written on it. I crumpled the paper and dropped it in the trash, then got a maple bar out of the doughnut box.

Beneath the maple bar was another note that said Take his number out of the garbage, you crazy dame, and call him. I laughed out loud and went to pick up the phone as I crammed half the doughnut into my mouth. It was after eleven, which meant Gary was at work by now, driving his cab. The old man had changed work schedules so he’d be able to play drummer boy for me every morning. I didn’t know how I’d ended up with friends that good.

I got Keith, the guy who manned the phones, on the line, and asked him to have Gary call me when he had a chance. I’d sent Keith flowers once for taking a message, and since then his surly mood always took a turn for the cheerful when we talked.

Gary called as I lay on the couch, polishing off a third doughnut and feeling like a bloated warthog. “Did you read the note he left me?” I demanded without saying hello.

“’Course I did. Had ta let myself back in to do it, too. You ate the maple doughnuts, didn’t you?” He sounded proud of himself. I laughed and dragged myself off the couch. Talking on the phone always made me want to walk around. That was safe with the kitchen phone, but the one in the bedroom had a cord, and I’d half killed myself with it more than once.

“Yes, I ate the maple doughnuts, and, Gary, how did you let yourself back in? I know I haven’t given you a key.”

“Gotcha an apple fritter, too,” Gary said. “An’ I wrote down his phone number, so even if you didn’t take it outta the garbage like I told you, I’m still gonna leave it lyin’ around your apartment.”

“I ate it, too. I’d think you were my dating service, except I don’t think they’re supposed to fatten you up for the kill.”

“Three doughnuts ain’t gonna fatten you up, Jo. You should give him a call.”

“Can’t,” I said. “Isn’t one of those dating-rules things that you’re not supposed to call for three days, or something?” There was nothing interesting in the kitchen except more doughnuts, and I couldn’t face eating another one just yet. I wandered across the apartment toward my bedroom.

“That’s after the first date, Jo, not after you went to bed with the guy.”

I winced. “I don’t think seventy-three-year-olds are supposed to say things like that, Gary.”

“Darlin’, this old dog says plenty he ain’t supposed to. How’s Holliday?”

I winced again and sat down on the edge of my bed, pulling a pillow out from under the neatly arranged covers to hug it against my chest. It smelled like Mark. I thought augh again and got up to go stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. “Still sleeping. Something’s keeping me from waking him up. I was going to do some research and see what I could find about sleeping sicknesses.” The woman in the mirror looked just like she had yesterday. Short black hair, warmly tanned skin, hazel eyes. Scar on her cheek, generous nose scattered with a few freckles, all the same things I expected. I knew her pretty well. She wasn’t the kind of woman who got drunk and slept with men she didn’t know. Hell. She didn’t even sleep with men she did know. Arm wrestling, as Mark had mentioned, now that sounded like my style. I rubbed my biceps absently, still staring at myself in the mirror. He must’ve gone really easy on me, if I wasn’t sore.

Sore.

Something pinged at the back of my mind and I moved to the bathroom doorway, looked toward my bed. “I didn’t sleep with him.” There was a sort of fluting laugh to my voice, a sound of childish relief. I could all but hear Gary blinking at me.

“What?”

“I didn’t sleep with him. I mean, we didn’t have sex.” I sat down hard in the doorway, my legs no longer eager to hold me. “Jesus.”

“You gonna tell me how you came to that conclusion, Jo?” Gary sounded wary. I laughed, the same high sound as before.

“I haven’t had sex in ages, Gary. I’d be sore.” My heartbeat had jumped up to about a zillion miles an hour, making a lump of sickness that tasted like apple fritter in my throat. I didn’t know relief could feel so awful. “I’d be sore and I’d be sticky and I haven’t taken a shower this morning and I’m not either of those things and so I didn’t have sex with him. Oh, thank God.” For some reason I was ice cold and shaking.

There was a profound silence that suggested that old dog saying things he shouldn’t or not, I had perhaps overstepped the bounds of friendship with that particular announcement. I was about to apologize when he said, “Kinda glad to hear it, sweetheart. Didn’t really seem like your style.”

I drew my knees up, still shivering, and shook my head. “Not at all.” Then I laughed again, twisting to look back at the bedroom. “He even made the bed.”

“You oughta call this guy,” Gary said again, with a sort of gentle kindness in the command. “Makes the bed, doesn’t take advantage of pretty girls in the bed. Give him a call, Jo. How many guys make the bed?”

“I don’t make the bed, Gary.” I pulled a towel down to wrap it over my legs, trying to ward off the cold of relief. “Maybe I will.” I sounded very quiet even to myself. The prospect of calling Mark, if I hadn’t slept with him, was considerably more appealing than it had been when I thought I had, and that was its own kind of scary. “Maybe I will, okay? You’re pushy.”

“Parta my charm,” he said, still triumphant. “I gotta fare, Jo. Gotta go. Call the kid.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Gary.” I beeped the phone off and sat there in my bathroom doorway, staring at my bed. It sat there, bedlike, tidy except for the pillow I’d dislodged. No startling attractive men appeared in it. After a minute I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Just to get you off my back,” to Gary, though he was neither there nor likely to believe me if he could hear me. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed me. Either way, I got Mark’s number out of the garbage and hoped for an answering machine.

To both my delight and dismay, I got one. I straightened with surprise and stuttered out a message, not sure if I wanted any of it to sound like “Call me back.”

Right before I said, “So, uh, bye,” the phone got snatched up with a clatter and Mark, a trifle breathlessly, said, “Joanne? Hi, sorry, I was in the shower. I heard your voice on the machine. Are you still there?”

I slumped against the door frame. “Yeah. Hi, Mark.”

“I didn’t think you’d call. Gosh, I’m glad you did.”

“Did you really just say gosh?”

A laugh came through the line, somewhere between pleased and embarrassed. “I did. Does that count against me?”

“It’s kind of cute,” I admitted more honestly than I’d intended to. “Look, Mark, this really isn’t a good time. I just wanted to call because, um.” Because Gary had told me to. I was twenty-seven years old. I wasn’t sure because somebody told me to was a legitimate reason for calling a boy. “To say it wasn’t a good time.”

“Not a good time for what?” he asked, more insightfully than I would’ve liked. “To talk on the phone or to talk at all? Is this the ‘It was a horrible mistake’ speech?”

“It was a horrible mistake, or it would’ve been if we’d had sex, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t, so it wasn’t. Except I don’t bring guys home, so it was.”

“We didn’t?” Mark, unlike me, sounded sort of disappointed. “Are you sure?”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed, even if it was still a sort of shaky sound, and bonked my head against the door frame. “Physical evidence on my part suggests we didn’t. Look, I’m sure you’re very nice, but frankly, I don’t know how to deal with you, and I don’t really think I want to have to figure it out.” That, again, was rather more honest than I’d intended to be. To my surprise, Mark laughed.

“At least you don’t pull your punches. Tell you what. Everything I know about you is you’ve got a sexy car—”

Anybody who compliments my car earns a special place in my heart. I melted for a moment.

“—and a sexier body—”

“Oh, get real.” The thaw was over.

Mark ignored my protest and continued, “You don’t cook and you’ve got a bunch of early-rising friends and you can outdrink half a police department. Now, what do you know about me?”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and peered at it, then sighed and put it back. “You’re cute, you cook and for some reason you apparently find me attractive. That’s about it.” That and he made the bed, which I didn’t want to mention, even if it was a point in his favor.

“Right. So that’s enough to get a first date on, right?”

“Sure. Wait.”

Too late. “I’ll see you for dinner tonight, then. Eight?”

“I—”

“Great! We’ll go somewhere decent. You can drive.” I could almost hear his grin and wink. “See you tonight, Joanne.” He hung up before I had a chance to get out of it, and left me gaping at the phone.




CHAPTER SEVEN


Plodding down to the parking lot wasn’t taking a shower, and it certainly wasn’t the best way to help Billy, but I found myself doing it, anyway, after finally putting the phone back in its cradle. I padded across the lot to the tree I’d parked Petite beneath, popping her trunk and wincing as the wrinkled steel creaked in protest. There hadn’t been time or money enough lately to start hammering the dents out. The insurance company still hadn’t paid up for the so-reported “act of vandalism” that had taken place back in January. I had full coverage on my baby. I thought the damned insurance company should stop dicking around and give me my money. It wasn’t like they even had to pay for a mechanic’s work, since I did all my own.

I pulled the jack and toolbox out of Petite’s trunk, still not quite thinking about what I was doing, and gave the gas tank cover an extra reassuring pat before I closed the trunk. It was an ongoing apology for having let somebody shoot an arrow through it, part of the same vandalism that’d ripped a twenty-eight-inch hole in her roof. I had no idea what else to call riders of the Wild Hunt taking axes and longbows to her. I didn’t think the insurance company would cough up at all if I claimed it was an act of gods.

A minute later I was on my back under the engine, tinkering with hot metal and inhaling the scent of gasoline and oil. Somewhat belatedly I realized I wasn’t wearing grubby clothes, and performed a shrug against the warm concrete I lay on. Yet another shirt and jeans relegated to the mechanic pile. I was going to have to go shopping soon.

A vague prickle of guilt set in as I fiddled with bolts. It wasn’t Petite that needed work. It was me. My head was spinning. I rarely got drunk. I never brought guys home, even if I had not, at least, actually slept with the one in question. I certainly didn’t find myself calling the guy back and agreeing to go out on a date. Well, I wouldn’t have thought I did, anyway. It’d never happened before, so apparently it was what I’d do in that situation. It still didn’t seem like me. I was by nature a much more isolated person than that.

I’d grown up on the road, my father unwilling to settle down for more than a few months. The one time he’d stayed anywhere over a year, a one-night stand he’d had showed up again and dumped a kid on him before flying back to Ireland without so much as an explanation. I’d had a pretty clear idea from a very early age what he was trying to leave behind.

Me.

My earliest memories were of mashing my nose against the car window, watching other vehicles whip by and calling “Zoom! Zoom!” at them. I loved the leather seats and the tangy scent of old cigarettes, the way the world skimmed by effortlessly and the thrum of power that shook the car as we took interstates and blue roads, always exploring. Dad taught me to read and how to fix cars, the two of us pulled off the road, me holding a flashlight while he bent his dark head over the engine. I got most of my primary school education that way, visiting historical sites and reading books about what had happened there. The one time I remember Dad having any real emotional response to one of those history lessons was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He never before or after made much comment about it, maybe because although he was as pureblood Indian as you could get, I was only a half blood, but there was a serious undercurrent of stupid white men to that particular lesson. The truth is, I’d think anybody who stood there and looked out over the battlefield lands would think stupid white men, because even I could tell that no one in his right mind would get in a fight there. But that wasn’t really the point, and after that, Dad started teaching me Cherokee. I didn’t remember much of it anymore, but there’d been a while when I was seven or eight when it was almost all we spoke.

That was also when we started stopping in small towns for up to a semester at a time, so I could get some proper education. Dad never really understood that I was badly socialized, having only had him for company, or that a white girl—because despite the tan I currently had, my coloring was my mother’s: pale skin, green eyes and black hair—who spoke an Indian language wasn’t going to fit in. He never had much idea that grades were at different levels all over the country, or that several weeks to a semester was only long enough for me to always be the new kid, not to belong. The older I got, the more I resented it, until I was old enough to enter high school and put my foot down. I told Dad he had to choose a place for us to stay for my whole high school career.

It was like he’d never seen me before. Behind all the years of resentment I had this feeling that at least it was always me and Dad against the world, but the way he looked at me was more like it’d been him on the road alone all that time, and suddenly this young woman had appeared to make demands of him. We went back to North Carolina, where he’d grown up and I’d never been. I spent my high school years in the Eastern Cherokee Nation, fitting in just as poorly as I ever had. Those were the borders I tended to define myself by. When I stretched outside of them, like I’d done with Mark, I found myself turning to the one thing I really knew I could rely on.

Cars. They were my home, my first memories, my comfort foods and smells, and they could take me away from all the things that were wrong with the world. When the going got tough, the tough went shopping, but I went to work on my car.

Concrete and asphalt, even sun-warmed, wasn’t exactly the most comfortable bed I’d ever lain on, but it was enough to have me yawning until my eyes watered within half an hour of starting to tinker on Petite’s undercarriage. A distant jangle sounded right next to my ear, the wrench sliding from sleepy fingers, but I couldn’t convince my hand to grope around for it. Eh, it didn’t matter. Nobody was likely to come along and nick my stuff while I was lying right next to it. It wasn’t as if I was actually going to take a nap in the parking lot, even if I did feel a bit stretched thin and gooey, like the asphalt was folding itself around me, one big comfy bed.



The sky was the wrong shade of blue. It was a color I knew, hard and pure and unrelenting, but it wasn’t the color I was used to. I squinted against it, tracking the sun from the corner of my eye. It, too, was without remorse or gentleness, heat intense enough to redden my skin just from a few minutes’ exposure. Weight pressed down on me, both in the dryness of the air and in the inescapable sense that this was one of the more important moments of my life.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, hotter and drier than the air. I turned to look up—unusual; I wasn’t used to looking up at much of anybody—and the scene changed around me.

Hot air became muggy, so full of water I choked on my first breath, tears suddenly blurring my vision. Heat vastly more intense than the air outside radiated at me, a fire built up in the center of a compact mudroom. I was one of four in the room, the other three sitting at cardinal points around the fire. I knelt, blinking against the heat, my hands on my thighs, and felt long hair sticking to my shoulders and back. I had never worn my hair long. My father had, but neither he nor I were patient enough to deal with a child’s tangles, and the unfamiliar feeling sent a shudder up my spine. I was not me, but I didn’t know who I was. Usually in dreams even when I was someone else, I thought I was me; now I felt like the butterfly wondering if he was a man, or maybe the other way around.

I tried to look down, but my head wouldn’t respond to my command, neck remaining stiff and my gaze direct and hot on the overwhelming fire. My heart knocked around inside me with a child’s excitement that I tried to quell: it wasn’t appropriate, no more than the grin that kept wanting to stretch across my face. I needed to be solemn and adult for this, the itchy idea that it would be taken away otherwise skittering over my skin. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I still struggled to be serious about it all. That was what everyone expected, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.

Time compressed and ballooned, stretching me across it like taffy until I felt barely attached to my body, a heady swimming sensation that made nausea float in my belly. Voices sang in the background, drums thudding with resolute direction. Sometimes I joined in, singing words I didn’t know in a language I didn’t recognize. Mostly, though, I let the songs and the heat and the drums sink into my skin, and pull me farther and farther away from my body. That was the purpose: I was there to be guided. Later I would become more active in these rituals, but for now I was the student.

A part of me, far beneath the music and the taffy feeling, said, so this is how it should have been, but that didn’t make much sense to me as I snapped apart from my body and drifted into a place of absolute quiet blackness.

Oddly enough, I knew where I was. It wasn’t the Dead Zone, the starless place between life and death and other worlds, though how I could tell the difference between one utter darkness and another, I wasn’t sure. Sparks of life floated through this place, like invisible motes reflected from inside my eyes. I drifted for what felt like a long time, watching them, aware that somewhere behind the bones of my ears, I could still hear the drums beating.

I couldn’t remember being so relaxed. The darkness was warm, unlike in the Dead Zone, where it had weight and purpose and chill, even when it wasn’t being visited by deadly snake-gods. I could rest here forever, warm and content and safe.

One of the floaties popped into something brighter and more solid, making me chuckle. Last time I’d seen these things, a whole host of them had come tumbling out of the black to rassle for dominance over one another. This time only one creature came, that quick burst of light seeming distant and hopeful. It was a coyote, I could see that, more ethereal than my Coyote and much more playful than the Big Coyote I’d met in the desert. It disappeared, leaving me resting in darkness again, then leaped forward, suddenly far closer.

The fourth time it reappeared, it did so directly in front of me, and looked up with a loll-tongued grin before butting its head against my thigh so hard I felt the ache all the way to the bone. I offered my hand, grinning back at the spirit animal, and it wrapped its long tongue around my wrist, then without warning or pain, began chowing down on my arm.

Surprise ricocheted through me, more out of familiarity and unexpectedness than fear or anger, and I gaped down at the spirit coyote’s silver fur and see-through lines as it worked on swallowing me whole. I’d been through this before, though I realized quite suddenly that the person I was in my dream hadn’t been. That part of me knew to expect this, but still felt more than a little horror and panic at being had for lunch. I had the peculiar sensation of trying to reassure myself that everything would be okay, and the even more peculiar sensation of not getting through to myself. After a few seconds I realized that for the other part of me, having Coyote eat me hurt, and I remembered that being the thunderbird’s snack hadn’t been a bowl of cherries, either. I was trying to figure out how to get past the pain and offer new reassurances when something nudged my ankle.

I peeled my arm away from my eyes, blinking blearily at legs visible up to slacks-clad knees. The knees bent into a crouch, hands dangling over them as Mark peered down the length of Petite’s undercarriage to grin at me. “This your idea of a fancy date, Joanne?”

Tuesday, July 5, 7:53 p.m.

I crunched up several inches, then crashed back down again, having narrowly avoided smashing my head on Petite’s engine. “Ma—uh? What’re you—what time is it? Jesus!” I flinched up a second time, again just barely missing bashing my head, and rolled to the side, getting out from beneath my car before I did myself serious injury. “Did I fall asleep out here?”

“It’s ten to eight,” Mark said. “I’m early. Sorry.” He stayed in his crouch, still grinning at me while I scrambled to my feet and pushed oily hands through my hair, then swore and rubbed them on my jeans. “Looks like you’re not quite ready.”

I stared at him wide-eyed, then turned to stare at my Mustang. Concrete wasn’t my favorite place to sleep, but concrete beneath a jacked-up vehicle was just asking to get dead. I couldn’t place the blame on Petite, but somehow I wanted to, as if she’d lulled me into a potentially deadly nap. “It’s eight o’clock?” The location of the sun and the coloring of the sky suggested Mark was not, in fact, lying to me. “Uh. Jesus.” I was never at my best right after I’d woken up, but waking up after an all-day snooze in a parking lot was high on a list of Ways to Discombobulate Joanne. I was astonished no one’d called the police or dropped the car on me or stolen my tools. I swung back around to stare at Mark some more, as if doing so would provide some sort of explanation for my behavior.

“You okay?” He looked up at me with the amusement still there, but dampened by genuine concern. “How long’ve you been out here?”

“Since…like, God, noon. Somewhere like that.” I pushed my hand through my hair again, then rubbed the scar on my cheek and felt grease slick across my face. Mark put his hands on his thighs and pushed out of his crouch, grinning again. He wore a maroon button-down that played up the red in his hair and looked soft. I curled my fingers against my face to keep myself from smearing oil all over his clothes, too, and transferred my attention to taking tools out from under my car so I could remove the jack. That was safer than feeling up Mark’s shirt.

“I came home to do some work on the car and to think, and…” My heart had started hammering too hard, making a wash of fright climb up my throat. I could believe I might fall asleep under Petite for a few minutes, maybe even an hour or two. But with the sun traveling through the sky and heating up both the day and the car, not to mention leaking light around the mask my elbow’d made, and with people in and out of the parking lot all day—that just wasn’t normal. I knotted my hands around the jack and held on, trusting it to not give out and crush me now when it hadn’t bothered to all day. “I can’t believe I slept out here.” My thoughts were still running down those tracks, wash, rinse, repeat. “That hard, all day. It’s not…”

“Natural?” There wasn’t any teasing in Mark’s voice, though he sounded wry. I looked up from the jack, then ratcheted it down, mouth pressed thin. “It’ll be okay,” he said, sounding a great deal like I had trying to reassure myself within the context of my dream. “Look. I’ve got reservations for eight-thirty at the Ponti Seafood Grill. You’re going to need some food, and I know you don’t have anything in your apartment.” I heard a smile come into his voice and looked up to see it reflected on his face. “I’m guessing you’re not the kind of woman who takes two hours to primp and get ready to go out. Why don’t we go up to your apartment, you can clean up and we can go to dinner? I won’t keep you long, I swear, but you’re going to have to eat one way or another, right?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t have anything to wear to Ponti’s.” Not that there was much dress code anywhere in Seattle—casual wear, hallmark of the Northwest, was accepted anywhere I ever ate—but Mark looked nice, and I didn’t have anything between jeans and sweaters and my dress uniform.

A car door banged shut somewhere in the parking lot and Phoebe’s voice sailed toward me: “Are you avoiding me, Joanne? You didn’t answer your pho—ooh. Hello.” The last, I guessed, wasn’t directed at me, as she appeared from down the lot and looked Mark up and down. “Hi. I’m Phoebe.” She offered a hand, seizing Mark’s forearm in a traditional warrior’s grip when he took it. Her expression was delicious, trying to watch both of us at once. “What’s up, Joanne?”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. I had managed to double-book the single evening I’d had plans for in months. “Uh. I, uh.”

“You have a date,” Phoebe surmised, laughter glinting in her eyes. “Is that why you said you couldn’t go out tonight? You’re not going out in that, are you?” She eyed my jeans and T-shirt with dismay, which didn’t seem fair. I’d barely gotten them grease-stained.

“I, uh.”

Phoebe turned a very bright grin on Mark and grabbed my upper arm as solidly as she’d taken Mark’s. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Give me twenty minutes and you won’t recognize her. Joanne, come with me.”

“I, uh,” I managed one more time, and Phoebe dragged me off to my apartment.




CHAPTER EIGHT


“Start talking,” she hissed as soon as we were inside the building door, though it didn’t stop her from pulling me up the stairs. “Who is he? Why didn’t you say something? He’s really cute, Joanne! What were you doing working on your car if you’ve got a date? What were you doing working on your car if you were supposed to go out with me? My God, it’s a good thing I came along. You’d have just worn that, wouldn’t you?” The barrage of questions and comments got us up five flights of stairs and into my apartment, where Phoebe let me go and flung her giant black purse onto my couch. “Talk,” she repeated. “I want the dirt! No, wait. Go get in the shower.” She shed her denim jacket as she spoke, revealing worn hip-hugging jeans and a black sleeveless spandex shirt that said “Hottie” in rhinestones across her breasts.

“I’m in over my head, aren’t I?” That was easier than trying to answer any of her zillions of questions.

“You dress fine for slouching off to Bethlehem.” Phoebe knocked the front door closed with a toe and leaned on the couch, arms folded. “But for dating you have less dress sense than my dog. Of course you’re in over your head. Shower.” She pointed imperiously at my bedroom. “Never fear. Phoebe is here. I’ll turn you into a heartbreaker.”

“I don’t want to be a heartbreaker,” I said somewhat dizzily, and went to take a shower. Somebody was in control, even if it wasn’t me. For the moment I just went with it. My brain didn’t seem to have quite woken up yet.

Four minutes of hot water later I felt slightly less fuzzy. The best thing about hair as short as I wore mine was the absolute minimal time frame it took to wash it. Phoebe was in my bedroom when I exited the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hands on her hips and her expression dismayed as she studied my closet. “I was right,” she said dourly. I stuck my jaw out defensively.

“Right about what?”

Phoebe turned on me, thick eyebrows lifted. She very nearly had an eyebrow, rather than eyebrows. It kind of went along with the compact, muscular build she’d gotten from years of fencing. In car terms, she was a Porsche: small, sleek, fast and powerful. In people terms, I was afraid to mention a pair of tweezers in her presence, for fear she’d kick my ass. “You have nothing at all to wear. It’s okay.” She’d moved her purse to my bed, and now she upended its contents onto the comforter. A glimmering gold thing fell out, then a pair of jeans and a tri-fold leather wallet that had taken a lot of beating. A compact bag fell on top of all of it. Phoebe pushed the wallet into her back pocket and shook the jeans out. “Put these on.”

I clutched my towel and squinted at the jeans. There was something wrong with them. “Are those yours? They’re short.”

“No, they’re not. Either. Not mine and not short. Put them on.” She thrust them at me. I edged by her and got some undies out of my dresser first, squirming into them before taking the jeans. I had the distinct impression I was being bulldozed and I’d somehow given tacit permission for that to happen. “What’s the gold thing?”

“Get the jeans on first.”

“I’m trying. They don’t fit. They’re too short.”

Phoebe inspected my ankles. The jeans hit right where they were supposed to, boot-cut and swinging against my anklebones. “They are not.”

“Up here!” I pulled the towel up to show her, trying desperately to pull the jeans up. The waistband wouldn’t go past my hipbones. My bellybutton was yards above the waistband.

“That’s where they’re supposed to hit, Joanne.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I yanked again, which was certainly uncomfortable, if not in the least productive. I was giving myself an all-around wedgie. Phoebe slapped my hands away from the waistband, zipped the zipper and buttoned the button, then stood back and nodded approvingly.

“Okay, that’s good. Shirt now.” She handed over the gold glimmery thing. I held it up in dismay.

“This isn’t a shirt. It’s a piece of gold lamé. With strings.”

“Wow. I wouldn’t have put money on you knowing what lamé was. It’s a shirt.” She took it away from me and tied two of the strings around my neck. “See?”

“I am not wearing this in public.”

“Yes, you are. C’mon, lose the towel.” She tugged it. I squawked and clutched it against my chest.

“Phoebe!”

“Trust me, Joanne. Would I lead you astray?”

“Yes.” I sighed and unwrapped the towel, feeling put-upon. Phoebe tied another series of strings behind my back, then clucked her tongue.

“Okay. Got any hair gel?”

“Will you have a heart attack if I say yes?”

“No.” She sounded far too cheerful, and went into my bathroom to root around. “You don’t own any makeup?”

“What would I do with it?” I sat on the bed, wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Phoebe clucked again and came back out with a palmful of mousse that she rifled through my hair.

“Close your eyes. And tell me about this guy while I do your makeup.” She unzipped the compact bag and dumped its content onto my bed, too: foundation, blush, lipstick, little jars of loose makeup and about fourteen makeup brushes of various sizes. The rest of it I didn’t recognize, which made me nervous. “Close your eyes,” she ordered again. I did. “Does he have a brother?”

“No,” I muttered, “he’s got a sister.” Wretched petite curvy redheaded Barbara. I could remember her name easily enough. It didn’t make sense that it’d taken numerous repetitions for me to remember Mark’s.

“That’ll do,” Phoebe said saucily enough as I opened my eyes. She nearly poked me with a brush and scowled. I closed my eyes again. “Where’d you meet him? How long’ve you been dating?”

“I just met him last night, Phoebe.”

“Ooh, first date. Good thing I’m here. What about Gary?”

My eyes popped open again. “What about him?”

“Does he know you’re seeing a younger man, too?”

“I’m not dating Gary! He’s seventy-three years old, Phoebe!”

“Uh-huh,” she said, full of polite disbelief. “Sure. So’s Sean Connery.”

I screwed up my face, feeling like words wanted to explode out and not knowing what I was going to say. “Anyway, he thinks I should go out with Mark. That’s practically the only reason I am.” Somehow that didn’t sound like it helped matters any. “Anyway,” I repeated, strenuously enough to burst something, “I’m sorry about double-booking. I don’t know how that happened. It’s—”

“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay, because I’m going to get all the prurient details afterward. You’ll feel too guilty to hold out on me. Open your mouth.”

“I hate lipstick.”

“I didn’t ask. Open your mouth.”

I opened my mouth. A moment later Phoebe gave me a tissue to smack on, then pointed me toward the bathroom mirror. “Go on. Go look at yourself.”

I eyed her, then got up and went to look.



Even if the mirror hadn’t told me so, Mark’s expression when we came back out of the bedroom said everything that needed saying. The ridiculous little gold shirt had strings that criss-crossed through half a dozen loops from my shoulder blades to the small of my back, where the shirt stopped entirely. Phoebe’s makeup job gave my skin a startling warm golden glow. I’d dug a pair of three-inch strappy gold heels out of the closet, finally glad for the rare bout of shoe lust that had prompted me to buy them years ago. I’d never worn them. Mark did a double-take at my feet when he realized I stood as tall as he did, then developed a slow, astonished smile that made me self-conscious and pleased all at once. Phoebe looked insufferably smug.

“My plan,” she told Mark airily, “had been to get Joanne a social life, but she seems to be managing it on her own. I’ve got a new plan. Now Joanne helps me get a social life. She said you had a sister.” Her grin was bright, and Mark laughed.

“I do. Look, I didn’t mean to bust in on you two having a night out. Can I make it up somehow? You could come to dinner with us, Phoebe.”

“Absolutely not.” Phoebe waggled a finger at him. “But if you can get Joanne out to Contour in Pioneer Square for a few hours after dinner, I’ll call it even.”

“I can’t dance, Phoebe,” I protested. “I really can’t. And this is a fluke. If I need to help you get a social life, you’re a disaster.”

Phoebe turned the waggling finger on me. “I, personally, am coming off a very bad breakup, which you don’t know because we’ve never really hung out before. So, see, you’ll be good for me. It’s a whatchacallit, parasitic relationship.”

Mark and I said, “Symbiotic,” at the same time, and I lifted an eyebrow at him before turning back to Phoebe, curiosity getting the better of me. “When was the breakup?”

“I thought cops didn’t know words like symbiotic,” she said, grinning. Then she assumed a guilty expression. “Um. A year and a half ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if you can’t dance. Make her come out, anyway, Mark. A very wise man once said, ‘Get up and dance, anyway, because nobody else cares if you can’t dance.’”

“I’ll try,” he promised. “Who said that?”

“Dave Barry. It was one of his life lessons. Right after ‘Do not take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.’ Now go.” Phoebe beamed at both of us. “See you guys later.”

I left the apartment with Mark, feeling somehow like I was walking half an inch in the air.



I’d hit the earth again by the time we went down five flights of stairs to get to my car. I hadn’t been on a date in so long I had absolutely no idea how to conduct myself on one, which didn’t go a long way toward creating the casual bantering atmosphere one tends to hope for on a first date. If that’s what this qualified as, anyway. I wasn’t sure, under the circumstances. Mark, however, was apparently much better at this sort of thing than I was, and put an appreciative hand on Petite’s roof as I unlocked her doors. “You did all the work on this yourself, huh? What year is she?”

The way to my heart was through my car. A blind man could see that. Morrison couldn’t, but a blind man could.

Morrison was really not the point here. I smiled at Mark and nodded. “Yeah. She’s a 1969 Boss 302. There were only about seventeen hundred built, and about half of them are automatics. Someday when I’ve got a lot more time and money I’m going to convert her to a manual. That’s my big dream for her.” Mark didn’t look glazed over yet, so I went on happily. “She was just a junker in somebody’s barn when I found her. They let me take her for the price of hauling her out of there. It’s been her and me ever since.”

“She’s beautiful.”

Mark was obviously a genius. I beamed and nattered on about my car all the way down to the restaurant. Unlike Morrison, Mark knew enough about cars to not embarrass himself, and unlike most men, he didn’t seem to feel it necessary to try to out-guy me on the topic. I noticed I’d been talking nonstop as we walked into the restaurant, and reined myself in with an effort and a surprisingly easy laugh. “You kind of found my Achilles’ heel. Get me started on cars and I can’t shut up.”

“Nah.” Mark waved his hand. “I like hearing what people are passionate about. You learn all kinds of things that way. Everybody’s got something they’re geeked about.”

“Geeked?” I laughed again. “I didn’t know geek was a verb.”

“Sure.” Mark actually held my chair for me as I sat down. What fascinating and bizarre behavior the courting male displayed. I wondered if he’d try ordering my dinner for me, too. “I’ve got this theory,” he said as he sat down. “Used to be that being a geek was a bad thing, like being a dork or a nerd, right?”

I put my elbows on the table and folded my fingers under my chin. “Sure.”

“Right.” He nodded. “But then computers got to be everyday appliances, people needed geeks, and now it’s pretty cool to be a geek. And I think the word has adapted. Now you can be a computer geek, a car geek, a cooking geek—”

“Those are called foodies,” I interrupted, smiling. Mark made a face at me and I laughed out loud again. “Sorry. I think I got that word from the Food Network.”

“You’re not sorry.” He didn’t look in the slightest bit upset, though, turning his face-making into a laugh of his own. “My point is if you’ve got a hobby or a job or a passion that you know a lot about, that other people don’t, you’re that kind of geek, and you get geeked about your topic.”

“So geeked is a new word for excited,” I said. “Were you an English major, Mark?”

His eyebrows quirked. “It shows?”

I made a loose fist and put it out, palm down. Mark, who knew a cue when he saw one, did the same and bonked his knuckles against mine. “Fellow English majors of the world, unite.”

“Bad spellers of the world,” Mark said, half under his breath, and together we said, “Untie!” Mark’s grin went so wide it looked fit to split his face. He put his menu aside—I hadn’t even noticed the waiter handing them to us—and said, “Know what really drives me insane? Misused quote marks on signs. ‘Big “sale’”,” he said, complete with air quotes around “sale.” “‘Price “reduction’”. ‘Lasagna “special’”.”

“Oh, my God. Me, too.” I actually leaned forward and grabbed his hand in sympathy. He was too good to be true. Not only was he cute and willing to listen to me babble about Petite, but he had the same language issues I did. I wanted one of my very own.

The thought that I could possibly have one of my very own heated my cheeks. Taking him home for a not-repeat of last night’s performance suddenly sounded pretty entertaining. For the first time I could remember, the idea made me smile, and I wasn’t embarrassed at all to let my English geek get out of hand. “Doesn’t it make you just want to stop and fix the signs, or go in and yell at people until they understand that using quotes like that implies sarcasm? That they’re saying exactly the opposite of what they mean? ‘“Rock-bottom prices’”!” Now I did air quotes, too, which was probably good, as it released Mark’s hand from my enthusiastic prison. “Or apostrophes. Don’t get me started on apostrophes. How hard is it to remember that i-t-apostrophe-s means ‘it is,’ or ‘it has’?”

“True confession time.” Mark leaned forward, too, dropping his voice to admit, “I can never remember that one. I always have to think about it.”

“But I bet you get it right when you think about it!”

“Well.” He sat back with a disparaging wave of his hand that made us both laugh. “Yes.” He lifted his menu with a challenging arch of an eyebrow. “First one who finds a typo in the menu wins dessert.”

“Oh, you’re on.” I picked up my menu and started flipping through it, grinning broadly. The waiter appeared at my elbow to ask politely if we wanted wine or appetizers, and Mark and I caught each other giving the other guarded looks. I pursed my lips and glanced sideways at the waiter. “No, thanks,” I said.

Mark nodded. “A few more minutes, please.”

The waiter slipped discreetly out of view again. “I’m not much of a wine drinker, anyway,” I mumbled. Mark gave me a disarming smile.

“More of the sort to go right for the hard stuff, huh?”

I made a laugh that was mostly in my nose and the top of my mouth, and therefore came out an unattractive wet snort. How delightful. Mark’s smile broadened, though, so maybe it wasn’t as gross as I thought it’d been. “I’m good with beer. I don’t usually drink liquor.”

“Does it mess up your—” Mark broke off, caught between winsome curiosity and apology. “Tell me to screw off if it’s none of my business, but I’m really curious about what Gary mentioned this morning. Shamanism? You’re really into that? Does drinking mess it up?”

For one brief moment I seriously considered killing Gary for opening his big mouth. My inexplicable powers did not strike me as good first-date discussion material. Bitching about the slaughtering of the language, yes; magic powers, no. I sat there looking at Mark for what felt like a very long time indeed, considering whether or not I wanted to answer his questions, and how far I wanted to get into the answers if I did. “No,” I said finally. “Drinking just impairs my judgment like it does anybody else’s. Um.”

“You don’t want to talk about it.” Mark’s smile went all apologetic. “Sorry. It’s just…talk about things to get geeked about. Magic. Shamanism. It sounds interesting.”

“Does it?” I scratched the back of my neck, looking at my menu. “There’s just no real way to talk about it without sounding insane.” I glanced up with a shrug. “I mean, honestly, if I went into it, explained what it was all about and said I had magic powers and could affect the weather,” which I managed to say without wincing, although it was a trial, “or could heal people, and you said, yeah, cool, I’m down with that, frankly, I’d think you were nuts.” I did think he was nuts. He’d been far too easy about the whole thing this morning. On the other hand, he asked smart questions about Petite. Maybe a willingness to consider the esoteric was a flaw I could learn to live with. I’d sort of have to, if I ever wanted to have a boyfriend again. Either that or I was going to have to develop a secret identity, and I didn’t think I had the body for running around in leather catsuits.





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