They left me alone for quite a while after that.
I waited for the nice young men in their clean white coats to arrive. When they didn’t, the bed Henrietta had abandoned was too tempting to ignore. The nice young men could wake me up.
Gary woke me up instead, gently shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, lady. Jo?”
“Lady Jo,” I mumbled into the pillow. “Kinda like that. Sounds like a romance heroine.”
Gary paused, distracted. “You read romances?”
“S’my deep dark secret. Go ’way.”
“Can’t. The ten o’clock news just came on. You might want to get out of here before Morrison gets back.”
I tried to peel one eye open, but my contacts were glued to my eyes again. “Whu?”
“You’re all over it. C’mon, let’s go.”
“Oh, God.” I turned my face and buried it in the pillow. “I don’t care. Let him kill me. As long as I get some rest.”
“You’ve had five hours of sleep,” Gary said without sympathy. “You’ve only got another day to solve this case, y’know.”
I pulled one eye open long enough to look at him. It teared up and shut again of its own volition. “What’re you talking about?”
“Most murders go unsolved if the murderer isn’t caught in forty-eight hours.” Gary spoke with an air of great authority.
“Serial murders are different. Go aw-” An alarming thought drained through my sleep-heavy brain. “What’s the date?”
“Fifth of January.”
I rolled onto my back, blinking tears away as I frowned at the ceiling. “Tomorrow’s the sixth?”
“There’s a bright girl,” Gary said approvingly.
“His power peaks tomorrow night.”
“Whose does?”
“Cernunnos. Yuletide. That’s what Marie said. His power peaks and then begins to fade until the summer solstice, and then he’s banished back to…”
“Wherever Celtic gods are banished to,” Gary supplied.
“Until Sa-Halloween.”
“Samhain,” Gary said. Sow-ehn, he pronounced it. I shook my head.
“I saw that word on the computer. When I look at it I see ‘Sam-hane.’ How do you remember how to say it?”
Gary shrugged. “Old dog. So what’s the big deal? After tomorrow, you get the upper hand. Sounds like a good way to play the game to me.”
“If I live through it.” The words made a little pit of sickness in my stomach. There was a very real possibility that I was going to end up dead tomorrow. I’d certainly come close enough in the past couple days. Gary frowned and jerked his chin at the door.
“Come on. You won’t live through tonight if your friend the police captain gets his hands on you.”
I groaned and rolled off the bed. “There’s a reassuring thought.”
“I do my best,” Gary said modestly. I chuckled through exhaustion. An alarming number of things were striking me as funny. I wondered if I’d ever get enough sleep to get over that.
“All right. All right. I didn’t even say anything to that stupid reporter. How can he kill me?” I opted against looking in the mirror, dragged the door open and walked into Morrison for the second time that evening. This time I bounced back a step while he stood there like a wall. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
“I oughta have you arrested.” Morrison was nose to nose with me again. I looked down at his shoes, tilting my head to the side a little. The soles of his shoes were the same thickness as mine. If I thought he could have, I would have guessed he’d done that on purpose.
“For what?” I looked back up at him. I could feel Gary looming behind me. It obviously didn’t bother Morrison at all, but it made me feel a little better.
“Interfering with a police investigation.”
“Have I interfered?”
“You’ve wasted my time and that of one of my officers for the past seven hours by keeping us here at this hospital.”
My eyebrows crawled up my forehead. “I’ve been asleep for the last five hours. How’d I keep you here? Hell, Morrison, you didn’t even know I was here when you showed up. You can’t blame me for you still being here.”
“You affected a principal witness in the case, Walker.”
“‘Affected.’” I stared at him. “How’s she doing, anyway?”
“The doctors can’t even find any scar tissue. What the hell did you do?”
“I healed her and Richard the Second of England through a psychic link with a Celtic demigod drawn out of her memory of the murders this morning,” I said flippantly, knowing Morrison wouldn’t believe it, even if it was God’s own truth. Or possibly because it was God’s own truth. His hand bunched into a fist and loosened again. I almost wished he’d hit me. A good old-fashioned hands-on ass-kicking might do me some good right now. I didn’t even much care whose ass got kicked.
“I always liked you, Walker,” Morrison said out of the blue. My jaw dropped.
“You did not.”
Morrison snorted, a sort of laugh, and admitted, “No. But you always seemed to have a head on your shoulders. No tact, but a head on your shoulders. But now you’re talking like Holliday. What the hell happened to you?”
I felt old and tired suddenly. “I’d love to sit down over coffee and tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me. It’s been a rough couple days, Morrison. I think something bad is going to happen tomorrow night and I have to find out what and stop it.”
“ I have to, dammit! It’s not your-”
“My job,” I agreed wearily. “I know. It’s your job. I just don’t think you can find what’s doing this, Morrison. I’m not sure I can, and they’re talking to me.”
“Who are?”
“The old gods.” I half laughed. “Dead people. This is not what I signed up for, dammit!”
“What did you sign up for?”
“Living another day, I guess. I didn’t know it was going to get so complicated.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, squinching my eyes closed. The contacts finally loosened up a bit and I could feel moisture in my eyes again. “Morrison, are you gonna charge me with anything, or can I go home now?”
“Are you going to go home?” He sounded like a belligerent bull.
“Yes,” I promised.
“Are you going to stay there?”
“What are you, my mother? Tell you what. I’ll stay home for the rest of my life if every two weeks you’ll cut me a paycheck I can live on.” I stepped forward to see if it would make Morrison move out of the doorway. It did. I was very impressed with myself. “I’m going home, Morrison. Good night.” Gary followed right on my heels, like an oversized protective shadow. I was halfway down the hall when Morrison’s voice followed me.
“Walker.”
I turned around reluctantly. Morrison frowned down the hall at me. “Stay home. This guy’s dangerous.”
“You’re making me all sentimental, Morrison. Knock it off before I get weepy.” I got all the way to the gate and out it this time.
“I think he likes you,” Gary said as the gate clanged shut. I laughed, a sharp bark of sound.
“Morrison wouldn’t like me if I were kind enough to never darken his doorstep again. He’d find me easier to tolerate, that’s all.”
“He likes you,” Gary said again, with an air of certainty. “He’s just afraid of you.” He slowed and let me go through the open half of a double door in front of him, while I glared over my shoulder at him.
“Afraid of me? Why would he be afraid of me? I’m not scary. You’re not scared of me.”
Gary pursed his lips. I stopped and looked at him, arms folded, waiting.
