by C. E. Murphy
I knocked on the door, staring at my feet, and nobody answered. I could think of a lot of reasons why someone might not answer the door at two in the morning, and none of them were reasons that suggested pushing the doorbell was a good idea. I did it, anyway. For a moment I thought it was broken, then heard it bong twice with increasing volume, and decided it probably rang three times, working its way up to being heard instead of starting out shrill and scaring the hell out of the people inside. It seemed like a good doorbell for a cop.
Nobody answered the doorbell, either. My tummy did a quick dive and swoop to the left, bringing illness intense enough to break a cold sweat on my forehead, and I finally clued in to the familiarity of the sensation. A similar sickness had prompted me to get off an airplane and go running across Seattle in search of a woman trying to outrace a pack of dogs, seven months earlier. The younger me had referred to it as being hit in the stomach with a golf club. I had more than justifiable nerves going on here.
The power inside me lit up like the Fourth of July once I finally recognized it. Gary was right. I really did need to figure out how to balance my life somehow. My focus was so limited I could either have power running or I could have emotional awareness turned on. I was almost certain that those two things ought to be intimately tied up in each other, instead of being divisive as the Grand Canyon.
That was about all the recrimination I had time for. The Sight fell over me again, doubling my vision for a few seconds, then settling out in a manner that was starting to feel familiar, if not quite natural. The walls of Morrison’s house thinned, support structures glowing strong and purposeful, and objects within became clear in their own neon bright colors. If I wanted to become a thief, this second sight thing could be very useful for casing out a joint ahead of time.
As if in disapproval, my vision wavered and flickered, darkening. I lifted a hand in silent apology to the power and it steadied again. I could practically hear a disapproving sniff, and despite everything found myself smiling. I wasn’t sure if it was me sniffing or if the magic I carried actually had a personality of its own, but either way I thought it was funny. Only I would end up with opinionated magic. Maybe that was the price of ignoring it for over a decade. It’d struck out on its own, forged new territory in the heart and soul of the Other realm, and came back with a smart-ass little voice that pointed out the obvious to me and didn’t like it when I thought about being naughty with my power.
I was doing it again. Procrastinating. I’d been staring through Morrison’s front door at the discreetly ornate wooden frame of a picture, not letting the Sight take me farther into the house. I had no words for how much I didn’t want to get an eyeful of Morrison and Barbara Bragg in bed together. On the other hand, I noticed I was physically leaning backward, my heels dug into the porch, and that my stomach was cramping from wanting to move forward. I hadn’t felt anything like this much impatience when I’d astrally snuck through Suzanne Quinley’s parents’ home. Somehow it suggested my power knew something I didn’t, and the more time I wasted the worse it was going to be.
Not that I could think of anything worse than getting to watch Morrison making love to his cute redheaded evil girlfriend. I ground my teeth together and let loose the dogs of war, separating from my body entirely so I could follow the urgent power that had brought me to Morrison’s home.
CHAPTER 26
Last time I’d done this I’d walked through the whole house as if I was there physically. This time there was no transition. I snapped to Morrison’s side without heed to intervening walls or worry about the house’s layout.
He lay sprawled on his back in the kitchen, for which I was perversely grateful. Kitchens were common areas, a room to invite people into. The bedroom, where I feared I’d end up, would’ve been unbearably intimate. Invading Morrison’s privacy was one thing. Invading his bedroom was something else.
He hadn’t, I remembered with a flush of bewilderment, had the slightest compunction about walking into my bedroom a couple days earlier. I suddenly had no idea how to react to that.
Lucky for me, it wasn’t a good time to be thinking about it. Barbara crouched at Morrison’s side, her hand over his heart. Her colors, half the rainbow in hue, were so vivid it hurt to look at her. Even in my astral form, when she moved it left blurs of crimson and sapphron and azure smeared across my retinas like acid etching into my eyes, sheer radiant power.
It was also incomplete, as if someone had thoughtlessly cut away her left hand, unaware that doing so maimed the whole. There were gaps of darkness as razor-sharp as the colors, spots of black that didn’t complete the whole. I hadn’t seen those slashes earlier, neither when she’d come into Morrison’s office nor when she was with Mark. I hoped that was because she was actively pursuing magic now, thereby exposing her flaws, and not because I was blind and stupid. I had a sense of patterns in the darkness, but looking that hard made my head ache, and there were other things to focus on.
Like the fact that it appeared she was trying to make up for her lost colors by feeding on Morrison’s. The solid purples and blues were already depleted, far worse than Billy’s or Mel’s. Morrison didn’t know how to build shields to protect himself. I hoped, abruptly and painfully, that I’d get the chance to teach him. Knowing he’d never do it was beside the point.
I extended a hand, all washed with silver-blue, and put it below Barbara’s, over Morrison’s heart, actually within his chest. Cold infused the back of my hand, then feathers as edged as scalpels lacerated the skin. It hurt like tiny paper cuts, more academic in the moment they happened than they would be in a few more seconds. My own shields pushed back against the injuries, healing sparks flying upward like a muffler dragging against asphalt. It tingled and itched, then flared bright in the instant that Barbara drew back in surprise.
That was all I needed. The timing was flawless, like the pit mechanics at a race. Seven-second tire change, though nothing like that much time passed in between Barb’s falter and my sliding shields into place, protecting my boss the only way I knew how. Silver power washed into him, building protective walls around a psychic garden I didn’t dare invade, but which I knew the peripheries of well enough to risk defining. I built points of contact, his complete lack of knowledge about cars tied with the practical safety of the Toyota in the driveway; practical safety bound with compassion that had brought him to tell a mother her daughter had died, when it could easily have been someone else’s job. And that tied to another daughter, six years old, treated with due respect and seriousness, which came around to the frown Morrison had bestowed on me when he ordered me not to belittle myself.
Endless details I hadn’t realized I’d known, from the Frank Lloyd Wright clock on his desk to his father’s seaman’s coat, from our identical heights making it hard for either of us to back down to the guts it took for him to point my magically talented self at problems mundane policework couldn’t explain, helped me to build a shield around my captain that cut off the life force that Barbara drained from him. Everything, his rare smiles and his steadfast belief in right and wrong, his stiff-necked acceptance of my talents and his exhaustive concern for his police force, hammered through me in waves of recognition.
No wonder I loved the man.
I closed my eyes against a blush that burned my cheeks, even in astral form. I could see it with my eyes closed, the physical action having no effect at all on my projected vision: red infusing the cool silver-blue that was my usual aura. I suspected there was strength somewhere in embarrassment, but if there was, I didn’t know how to use it for myself. I thought it might help maintain the shield I’d built, though, as it was intimately bound to Morrison himself.
I lifted my eyes and met Barbara’s gaze square on, totally unsurprised that she could see me. Her mouth pinched, eyes tightening, and her shoulders went back. Not with shock, but preparation. Even knowing that for some reason she was only at half strength, watching the changes in her body language sent the primitive lizard
part of my brain running screaming into the dark recesses of my mind. I didn’t know what exactly Morrison’s new lover was, but I was very sure I didn’t want her to hit me.
A very small blossom of rage opened up inside me and I realized that more to the point, I didn’t want her to hit him. I felt my lip curl as I leaned forward, literally bracing myself against whatever onslaught she had prepared.
Time went desperately weird.
It went still all around me, worse than the slowed-down clarity of a fight. It froze, as if I’d be able to see raindrops hanging in the air. Barbara’s breathing stopped, though there was no flatness in her eyes that bespoke death. I couldn’t tell if I did the same, because I wasn’t sure I even breathed when I left my body.
I hadn’t been particularly aware of my body for the last several seconds, though I knew in a clinical sense it was out there standing on Morrison’s front porch. Having now spared it a thought, I could almost feel the memories of the past few moments pouring through it, as if it was catching up on details of a movie it hadn’t been paying attention to. Everything rewound, a blur of silence and images, until I’d reamalgamated with myself and all my memories and awareness were in one place, back there on the porch.
I snapped forward again.
This time it hurt, a concussive smash into—
—the future. The present. For a bewildering instant I wasn’t sure where or when I was anymore. Morrison’s kitchen floor was hard under my knees, my body having joined its spirit, apparently without bothering to travel the distance separating the two. My ears rang with a disrupted song of power, jangling noise fading away even as I noticed it. I felt like there were eddies swirling off my skin, as if I’d become a sticking point in a river and that river had briefly bent to my will.
I still saw with the Sight, but ordinary vision lay beneath it, picking up details that hadn’t been important to my projected self. The lingering scent of meat and tomatoes was in the air, reminding me I hadn’t eaten for hours. The dishes hadn’t been done, a frying pan sitting on the stove. I wondered if they’d come back to Morrison’s for dinner after my little display at the restaurant. Streetlamps colored the walls through big windows, no lights on inside.
My outstretched hand now rested on Morrison’s chest, no longer just beneath the surface of his skin. Barbara’s hand, warm and sweaty, lay on top of mine. My own skin shimmered with the silver-sheened rainbow slick of power, but not translucently. And Barbara was breathing again, time loosing its hold on her. Fury glinted in her eyes as she recognized that time had hiccupped, and she drew breath to spit something at me.
I twisted my right hand up to grab her wrist, and brought my left fist around in a roundhouse blow that caught her squarely in the teeth.
With all due modesty, I really think she’d have gone flying if I hadn’t had a grip on her wrist. As it was, the weight of her body pulled me forward as she recoiled. If I hadn’t had thirty pounds on her, I’d have flopped ignominiously across Morrison’s chest. Some rescue that would’ve been.
Although as far as rescues went, this one pretty much sucked, because Morrison wasn’t waking up. I tensed my stomach muscles and surged to my feet, hauling a dazed Barbara with me. I let go of her wrist and knotted both hands in her shirt before she got her feet under her, and discovered I could actually pick her up far enough that her feet dangled just above Morrison’s chest. There was a certain amount of genuine glee involved in whirling around and slamming her up against a wall so I could yell, “What the hell are you?” into her face. I felt like an action hero.
She got enough focus back to stare at me, which I thought was a good sign. Then she smashed her head forward into the bridge of my nose, which wasn’t nearly as good a sign. I dropped her, yowling with pain, and she slithered down the wall. Women, especially cute petite women, weren’t supposed to head-butt people. Girls like me, who stood almost six feet tall, could head-butt in a fight. That was okay. Little women were supposed to shriek and flail and use their fingernails, not their foreheads.
I bet Phoebe would kick my ass just for thinking that. In something like my defense, instead of kneeing me in the crotch, which is what I would’ve done if I’d been her, Barbara dropped to hands and knees and scrambled around my legs while I swore as violently as I could. It didn’t help my nose any, but it made me feel better enough to turn around and deliver a swift kick to Barbara’s ribs. She lifted up a gratifying few inches and went over on her back to land on Morrison’s shins with an oomf! I wanted to take a minute and fix my nose so tears would stop blinding me, but Barb rolled off Morrison and staggered to her feet, reaching toward the counter for support.
Wrong-o, Joanne, I heard myself think, far too brightly. Barb’s actions telegraphed through tear-blurred vision just an instant before she completed them. The counter wasn’t her goal. The frying pan on the stove was. She slung it at me, marinara sauce splattering everywhere. I flung up my arms with another yell, crossing them in front of my face.
The impact bounced off my arms hard enough to leave a bone bruise. I shouted again, half in anticipation of burns than the immediate pain of the pan crashing into my arms. It took a good three seconds to realize there wasn’t any accompanying singeing of my arms or thick boiling liquid dripping down me. I squinted one eye open to discover a sheen of blue-tinged power dancing over my skin, my mental shields made manifest in reality. Only very belatedly did I realize the sauce wasn’t hot, anyway, but had it been, I’d managed to protect myself.
It was the second time that had happened, but this time a sudden crash took place between my ears. I remembered one very long tiring night where Coyote coaxed those shields out, exhausting my brain with the idea of sheltering my whole body in shielding when I thought it was hard enough to protect my mind.
I also remembered falling asleep in English class the next day, with one ear half listening to a discussion on Hamlet. The teacher, suspecting me of sleeping, had called on me and I’d sat upright blurting, “Polonius!” without the foggiest conscious idea of what was being discussed. The teacher’s irate expression and a sense of smugness on my part still lingered, so I knew I’d been right.
I muttered, “Thou canst not then be false to any man,” as I lowered my arms, shielding still washing over my body protectively. I was starting to think the old windbag might’ve been on to something, which would have gratified my English teacher to no end.
To my complete astonishment, the same cool blue protection danced over Morrison, who was almost as liberally spattered with sauce as I was. Once I’d seen it, I could feel the stretch in my mind that said I was maintaining the mental shielding. The connection went deeper than I’d thought, and I had the sudden uncomfortable sensation that I might not be able to undo it.
It didn’t matter, at least not for the moment. Without the shields I could provide, Morrison’s life force would be drained away in very little time, so undoing the thing was out of the question. I wondered, briefly, if other people were as vulnerable as the captain was, and thought it unlikely. For one thing, people I knew would be dying in droves, if it were so. For another, I was pretty certain I’d been right in what I’d told Morrison: it was those I had the deepest emotional connections with who were in the most danger. I guessed it was lucky for Seattle in general that I didn’t have many close friends, or deep hatreds. I’d done what I could with more casual acquaintances with the topaz pieces, and would have to hope they’d work.
Topaz.
I could kill Morrison for giving away that topaz.
My attention came back up to Barbara, who stood by the stove looking very human and confused, so much so that my heart went out to her. I knew that look. I felt like I’d spent an awful lot of time with it on my face. I was actually putting my hand out to her, like I might offer some kind of comfort, when whatever uncertainty had surfaced was swallowed whole again, and Barb sprang across Morrison’s body at me, her hands clawed.
That was more what I expected from a chick. I braced mysel
f, but not enough, and her weight drove me over backward into Morrison’s kitchen table. I heard wood splinter and the smooth surface lurched downward beneath us while Barbara skimmed her lips against her teeth and hissed from the back of her throat. I grabbed her wrists and rolled, crashing off the table into the chairs. More wood splintered, and I wondered how I was going to explain the remains of the kitchen when Morrison woke up.
If Morrison woke up.
For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything except red, and I wasn’t sure if that was the Sight or just my normal vision full of fury. Barb got a hand loose and jabbed her fingers into my eyes. I screamed, as much with anger as pain, and grabbed her wrist again to bite into the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She shrieked and jerked away, sending us off the chairs and onto the floor, the light dimming. I spat out a mouthful of coppery blood, gagging on the flavor. My vision cleared again, tears streaming, and I snatched her hand out of the air as she drove it toward my eyes again. Her wrists were tiny, and once I had both of them I knotted the fingers of one hand around them, imprisoning her and leaving me with a hand to punch her with.
Triumphant, I reared back on my heels to get my weight behind a hit, and clobbered my head on the table. Stars sparkled in my line of sight and I realized a little too late the reason the lights had dimmed was we’d rolled under the table. Barb pulled her legs up and kicked me in the stomach with both feet, sending me back far enough to smack my head on the table again. I did my best mindless beast roar and flung myself on her, no longer trying to get a hit in. I would just smother her with my superior body weight. And whack her in the eye a few times with my elbow, if I could. For a few seconds we were biting and rolling and scratching and screeching, the indignity of fighting like girls ridiculously clear in my mind. I couldn’t remember getting in such a noisy fight before.
