by C. E. Murphy
He squeezed my shoulders and put a kiss on my forehead. “You’re not a freak show, Joanne. Don’t worry about them.”
My smile got less lopsided. “Yes, I am, but thanks. And thanks for staying, back there. I appreciate it. It was probably dumb and dangerous, but I appreciate it.”
“You really know how to lay on a compliment, Walker.” Thor sounded like Morrison, all dry and faintly amused. I made a face and he laughed before his expression faded into something more serious. “I can’t run out when things get weird or dangerous if we’re going to make this work. I want to be there to help. To keep you safe.”
Warm fuzzies collided with bemusement to give me indigestion. “It’s hard to keep me safe from things you can’t see. I don’t need that much protecting.” It was true. Typically, what I needed was information, which—much as he might want to—I doubted Thor was in any position to provide. On the other hand, he really was making an effort to fit in to my life, and I didn’t want to push him out just because the dangers I generally faced were one step removed from the reality he was grounded in. I nudged my hip against his, hoping I hadn’t sounded ungrateful and that I didn’t now sound patronizing: “But if I run up against Loki, you’re the first one I’m calling, okay?”
“Sounds like a date, especially if you’re going to wear that costume when you start fighting gods.”
I said, “I’m usually in jeans and a sweater,” without thinking, and he looked a little nonplussed. See, this was the problem with starting to accept my own surreality. It made me say things that sounded as if they’d been brought to you by the new brand of azure giraffe.
Sirens and flashing lights heralded the ambulance’s arrival. I stopped beneath a leafless tree, trying to avoid drops of water from its black branches, and watched paramedics jump out of the vehicle and run into the hall. “I should go back.”
“To give a report or to help?”
Only half listening, I said, “Yeah,” and Thor slid his hand to mine and tugged my fingers, a shy and sort of charmingly little-boy action.
“You heard the Hollidays. You need to check for—”
“Ghost riders,” I supplied, then ground my teeth. “Yeah. Okay, so to give a report, then, though I don’t know what I’m going to say. Still, I…” I turned away, but Thor caught my hand a little harder and pulled me back. I looked up, surprised, to find his expression much like the gesture had been: shy and sort of charmingly hopeful.
“It’s a kind of spirit quest, right? You’ve got that drum. Do you need somebody to play it for you?”
My heart and stomach took a quick drop toward my feet and left my cheeks burning. The question itself was fairly innocuous, but what lay under it ran a hell of a lot deeper. Thor had seen the skin drum that held place of pride on my bedroom dresser, and I’d seen his curious gaze linger on it more than once. He’d never touched it, apparently—and correctly—regarding doing so as an intimacy he hadn’t yet been granted.
In fact, since my powers were so rudely awakened, only three people’d touched that drum: me, my friend Gary—who’d been invited to do so long before I considered using the drum as an intimacy at all—and Morrison, whose touch on the painted leather might have been fire on my skin. Part of me didn’t want Thor touching the drum because it might not have that same sensual, completed feeling when he did.
The other part of me wasn’t ready for him to handle it in case it did.
He didn’t know that. He didn’t have to. What he did know was the drum, and the out-of-body experiences it sent me on, were important, and that he hadn’t yet been invited to participate in that. It was a glass wall, invisible but holding us apart, and all my rational bits thought I probably wasn’t being fair.
My less rational bits—like my heart and stomach, which both still felt as if they’d fallen into the southern hemisphere—didn’t give a damn about fair. They were worried about the right choice, and the lurchy feeling they left me with was way too much like a fifteen-year-old girl going against her smarts and having sex with a boy in hopes of getting him to like her. I’d been there, done that, got a lot more than a T-shirt, and like I said, I do at least try to make new mistakes. Edward was a great guy, but I wasn’t anything like ready to ask him to drum me under on a spirit quest.
And he was a great guy, so as my heart resumed its regular place in my chest cavity, guilt swam in to fill the empty spots it’d left. There was no way out. I liked him too much to want to hurt him, but I couldn’t give him what he was asking for, so of course he’d be hurt—not angry, because he was too decent for that, but disappointed, at least—and so up came the guilt, which made me think maybe I should, you know, go ahead and do what he asked anyway, and…
I didn’t know if men ever went through that kind of thought process, but this was one of those emotional hatchet-job moments where I couldn’t help thinking that being a woman really sucked.
And Thor, who really was a decent guy, didn’t make me fumble my way through an apology. He just studied me while my face went stricken, then sighed quietly and nodded. “Maybe next time.” He squeezed my fingers, then glanced toward the party hall and the paramedics. “Let’s go see if they need your report, huh?”
“Edward.” I didn’t often use his real name, so he was looking back even before I pulled him to a stop, determined not to utterly blow a good thing. “I like you.” Those were pretty simple words. It didn’t follow that saying them should come out all shaky and nervous. “I like you a lot. This thing with the drumming, it’s not…it’s not because I don’t like you or I don’t trust you.”
His eyebrows went up a little. “I like you, too, but you don’t trust one of us, Joanie. I’m willing to bet on it being you, at least for a while.”
I followed him back to the party hall, well and truly subdued.
The dancers were whisked away to the hospital suffering from severe electrolyte imbalances, which my mind insisted on processing as “severe acolyte imbalances.” Once I’d been assured they’d be okay, I kept snickering at visions of little hooded figures singing Gregorian chants and stumbling around like drunkards. Thor looked askance at me, but apparently the joke lost something in the telling.
My report, like everyone else’s, was all but useless, though in my case I had to explain why I’d clapped my hands over their mouths. A fumbling story about being afraid they’d bite their tongues got me more or less off the hook. Once the paramedics were gone, a startling number of people came back in to the party, but I gave Thor a kiss and slunk out to my car with every intention of heading home.
Billy tapped on Petite’s window, catching me wriggling around trying to get my stupid little skirt far enough under my butt and thighs to provide some kind of barrier between bare skin and clammy leather seats. Petite was a beautiful car, the unquestionable love of my life, but she had a definite opinion about somebody wearing the kind of outfit I had on and sitting in her. My back stuck to the seat, too, and sent goose bumps all over me. I peeled away and rolled the window down. “Was I speeding, Officer?”
“It looked like you were doing something a lot more illicit than speeding, but Johnson’s still inside. You heading home?”
“I think I’ve had enough partying for one night.”
“I’d agree, except for two things.” Billy leaned against Petite’s roof and looked down at me. “First, I want to be there when you go checking for ghost riders, because you’re not equipped to deal with them. They’re more my specialty.”
I opened my mouth to argue, considered his point and skipped the argument. “Fair enough. And?”
“And Phoebe’s already gone, so Mel wanted me to make sure you realize that means you’re the only host left for this party.”
I put my hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead for a minute. “I hate my life.”
“No, you don’t.” Billy pulled Petite’s door open and offered me a hand. “C’mon. Mel and Johnson and I will stay late and help you clean up, and then we can get you
cleared for duty.”
“Everybody’s going to stare at me if I go back in there.”
“They’d stare at anybody who was as much of a long tall drink of water as you are in that outfit.”
I cricked my neck and eyed him. “Did your wife send you out here to flatter me, Mr. Holliday?”
“My wife sent me out here to take whatever measures necessary to make sure she wasn’t the one left cleaning up your party alone. Flattery first. Next I throw you over my shoulder and carry you back in. Your choice.”
“All right.” I kicked long bare legs out of the car and stood up. Hey, if he was going to make tall-drink-of-water comments, I was going to admire myself a little. “But if anything else out of the ordinary happens, I’m leaving. I’ll just pay the damn fee for having the owners clean the place tomorrow.”
I should have defined out of the ordinary.
It turned out worrying about my behavior had been pointless. Apparently most people thought leaping up onto the cauldron to help the dancers was kind of heroic, and enough alcohol had been imbibed that the light show around me had been largely written off as just that: a light show. There was a lesson to be learned from that, though by now I should’ve already learned it.
People were good at explaining away things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Over the summer I’d been worried that I was foisting magic onto a world that didn’t want it, but really, the handful of people who did want it believed, and the rest let themselves forget. A newly born waterfall at the end of Lake Washington had been given the name Thunderbird Falls after half the city’d seen, well, a thunderbird fall into the lake. By the end of August, though, if anybody mentioned the gigantic golden bird at all, they remembered the astonishing cloud formations and sunset that night. I shouldn’t have worried, not then and not now.
By midnight nearly everyone had come back to the party, even Phoebe, who ran a masquerade competition as if nothing untoward had happened. I won a “Best Abs” prize that I don’t think had been on the original list of awards to be given out, and the department-heavy attendees made Morrison walk the stage three times before razzing him off with cheers and laughter. A bunch of people told me I’d done good, trying to help the dancers, and a bunch more dragged me onto the dance floor or stole me away from Thor for the space of a song. The booze ran out before the music did, and there were maybe fifty people left, almost all of them dancers not quite willing to go home, when Morrison tapped Thor on the shoulder and asked to cut in.
See, I knew I should’ve defined out of the ordinary. Thor bowed out and tried to steal Phoebe from a natural blonde who didn’t want to give up her dance partner. He ended up sandwiched between both of them, and I grinned before Morrison put his hands on my waist and took up all my attention.
He said, “Sorry,” perfunctorily. “I could’ve waited for faster music, but I wanted to talk to you.”
I flailed a bit and put my hands on his shoulders, which were considerably more covered than my waist was. In fact, although I hadn’t thought anything of it when Thor’s hands had been in the same place, I suddenly wanted to hitch my skirt up off my hips and settle it safely around my waist, where a proper skirt belonged. Except then my very short skirt would have become completely indecent, which wasn’t a win at all.
Or maybe it was. I guess it depended on who you asked.
In an attempt to shut my brain up, I stuck my jaw out too far and bared my lower teeth, making a llama face. It was sufficiently embarrassing to take my mind off my skirt, so after holding it a couple of seconds I trusted myself enough to say, “No problem. What’s wrong?”
Up. I should’ve said what’s up, not what’s wrong. Still, pretty much any time Morrison wanted to talk to me, something was wrong. His hands were warm, warmer than Edward’s, and he smelled good. Like Old Spice, which I doubted was a Miami Vice cologne. And I was taller than he was, which reminded me of the clowns with their noses in my cleavage, although Morrison would have to look down to do that.
I made another llama face.
Evidently weird faces weren’t enough to throw my boss off his game. “What happened earlier?”
“A bunch of angry ghosts spilled through the cauldron and tried to take over those kids.” I said it without missing a beat. Somewhere along the line I’d decided to play it straight with Morrison. He didn’t like my powers any more than I did, but he accepted I had something extraordinary going on, and if he couldn’t deny it, he could at least do his best to make use of it. He’d made me a detective and partnered me with Billy so we could deal with abnormal cases when they came along, and what he was really asking right now was whether one had just fallen into our laps. “I don’t know how or why. I think Billy and I chased most of them off, but he’s still got some stubborn ones hanging around him and I might’ve let some latch on to me. We’re going back to my apartment after we clean up here to check and give me the all-clear.”
A bunch of minute things happened in Morrison’s expression. Most of them had to do with tension and resignation, and said he’d asked and therefore deserved to get whatever outlandish answer I gave him. My face crumpled with apology. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got. Billy didn’t seem to know what was happening, either, so—”
Morrison said, “Walker,” making it sound very much like Billy’s shut up from earlier, so I did. Morrison nodded, and that quick array of tiny changes flashed across his face again before he said, carefully, “Holliday’ll watch out for you.”
“Sure, he always does. I mean, I don’t know, I guess…” I frowned at Morrison’s brown hair, caught up in logistics. “It’s going to be four in the morning before we get out of here. I can’t really call Gary and ask him to drum me under, but Billy never has, and besides that he’s going to have to go with me. I guess Mel, but—”
Morrison said, “Walker,” again, and I clued in with a physical lurch that turned my ankle. Morrison’s hands tightened on my waist. For an instant we were frozen in an awkward noir pose, the sort where the hero seizes the heroine’s arms and pulls her close before kissing her like she’s the most exasperating woman on earth. Except I was much too tall to be a noir heroine, even bent awkwardly while I tried to get my foot back under me, and for all the intensity of those old-movie poses, they never seemed to really have much in the way of bodies pressed together. There was body-pressing going on here. There had to be: Morrison’d braced me against himself so I didn’t topple over entirely.
He did not, however, look as though he’d like to kiss me. He looked as if I’d stepped on his foot, and like whatever had prompted him to say my name had been a bad idea.
Intuition and me weren’t the closest of friends, but I was still following the thought that’d led to my collapse. Morrison hadn’t been asking if Billy would take care of me. He’d been asking if I needed him to. Bubbling gladness spilled through me, as though he’d offered an answer to problems I didn’t even know I had. I wanted to hug him, or bury my nose in his neck, or something else unseemingly physical. I held it back to an idiotic beam and blurted, “Shit, I’m sorry, yes, that’d be—”
Morrison put me back on my feet and I looked over his shoulder to see Thor. Guilt that had gone passive surged back to life and my smile crumbled. Everything crumbled: I felt like I was shrinking, delight draining out and leaving bone-deep regret. I’d shut Thor down a few hours ago when he’d had the courage to ask if he could help, and jumping at the chance to put Morrison in his place, especially when the captain had been so circumspect in asking, seemed like a particular and special brand of cruelty. Thor’d been right: I didn’t trust one of us in our pairing, and the fact that Morrison’s offer sent my heart soaring where Thor’s sent it plummeting didn’t bode well for which one I didn’t trust, after all.
Morrison turned us both so he could see where I was looking. His hands loosened abruptly and he fell back half a step, making room for the Holy Spirit between us. He took a breath and I knew, I just knew, he was going to issue a retraction. I grab
bed his lapels hard enough that my hands ached from it, and he exhaled, words lost in surprise.
“I…” I wanted to say a million things. Most of them didn’t seem especially appropriate. I held on to his lapels for a moment longer, then let go and smoothed them, like doing so would help me keep my voice moderate. “I would be a lot more comfortable with you drumming me under than with calling Gary in the middle of the night and asking him to come over.”
There. That sounded very reasonable. It didn’t touch on why I wasn’t having Thor do it, because that was none of Morrison’s business. It didn’t focus on the fact that Melinda would no doubt be perfectly fine drumming me under. It was also utterly true. I’d rather have Morrison, who was already awake, lend a hand, than get a seventy-three-year-old out of bed and ask him to help.
It in no way told Morrison, or let me acknowledge, that when my captain picked up that drum of mine, I felt magic.
Christ, I was doomed.
CHAPTER 6
Phoebe and Morrison and half a dozen other lag-behinds stayed to help clean up, so we were out of there by half past three. Phoebe’d come over with me, but her eyes skittered away and she hailed someone else for a ride home. Worse, for the first time since I’d known her, she didn’t remind me of our upcoming fencing lesson. Thor snaked his arms around me for a hug. “She’ll come around. Give her a little time.”
“To get used to me sounding like a lunatic?” I gave him a wan smile and glanced toward Petite. “I’m going to go home and get this ghost thing sorted out, okay?”
“Sure. Call me in the morning and let me know you’re all right.” If he resented being kept away, he did a good job of hiding it. I felt guilty all over again. Relationships were complicated. No wonder I’d stayed away from them all this time.
Amazing how the human mind will let a person rearrange facts to suit her. That phrasing made it sound as if I’d made a deliberate choice to not get seriously involved with anybody since at least college. But if I was serious about the new Joanne-faces-reality lifestyle, it would be somewhat more accurate to say I’d buried my head in the sand and gone “LA LA LA LA LA” to drown out any possible chance of having to deal with romantic entanglements. Emotionally stunted, that was me. At least I had nice long legs to make up for it.