by C. E. Murphy
“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 4
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 evermore 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 5
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 goi
ng 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.”