Kitabı oku: «Coyote Dreams»

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.