“I didn’t get you stabbed,” he pointed out.
“Details, details. Where’s that sword, anyway?”
“At my apartment. Couldn’t keep it in the back of the cab while I was working. You want it?”
I thought about that for a minute. “Yeah, I think so. Can you bring it by tomorrow?”
“Before or after work?”
“Um.” I sucked on my teeth. “Before.”
“Okay.” Gary stood up. “I’ll be by around five-fifteen.”
“Gah. I’ll try to be awake.”
“You’re young. You can survive on a few nights of not much sleep.”
“Easy for you to say. You haven’t been fatally wounded twice in two days.”
Gary’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up. “Twice?”
“Um.” I rubbed my hand over my stomach. “The second time was at the hospital. It didn’t exactly happen on this plane of reality.” I winced as I said it. Gary’s eyebrows remained elevated, but he didn’t say any of the sarcastic things Morrison would have said.
“I got myself knotted into a couple of other people’s lives,” I mumbled. “If I hadn’t been able to fix them, I think I’d have been dead when you came back with the coffee.”
“Richard the Second,” Gary said, in that carefully neutral voice again.
“Yeah.” I scowled defensively. “He put Herne the Hunter to death.”
“Herne the Hunter.”
“The one we read about on the computer.”
I nodded. Gary spread his big hands and shook his head. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“It was Herne at the school today,” I said impatiently. “I borrowed Mrs. Potter’s memories and Herne dragged me into his playing field.” I was sure I’d told him about this already. From his expression, my mind was playing tricks on me.
“Borrowed?”
I sat down. “She was telling me about what happened at the school and I wanted to help her get through the bad memories. Something happened. I shared her memories, like we had some kind of hive mind thing going. And then Herne dragged me out of her memories into his own. And I got all caught up in something that happened hundreds of years ago. It was like I was really there.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
Gary was very quiet. I looked up to find him frowning at me. “Why didn’t you tell your captain any of that?”
“I—” I broke off, my forehead wrinkling. “Didn’t I?”
“No,” Gary said. “You didn’t.”
“Oh.” I considered the question for a minute. “Because he’s a sanctimonious asshole?”
“I get it,” Gary said sagely. “You like him, too.”
“For God’s sake. Go home, Gary, you’re getting delusional from lack of sleep.” I remembered thinking Morrison was close enough to kiss, and groaned. “Go home,” I said again. Gary finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink, looking at me with what I was beginning to recognize as his expression of concern. It looked a bit like a polar bear with indigestion.
“You gonna be all right here, Jo?”
“I’ll be fine,” I promised, absurdly touched by his worry. “I’m just going to read for a while and then go to bed. No crazy antics. I promised Morrison.” I made a face.
“No, you didn’t.”
Damn. “I don’t think he noticed that.”
“Don’t count on it. I’ll be by around a quarter after five,” he reminded me. “Lock the door.” I nodded and followed him to the door to lock it behind him, then stood there for a full minute, waiting for another shoe to drop.
CHAPTER 16
Nothing happened.
Nothing kept right on happening while I fell asleep leaning on the door. My knees buckled, jolting me awake, and I staggered to the computer chair. There had to be something I could find about Herne, something that would tell me what was going on. If it wasn’t on the Internet, it didn’t exist, right? So it had to be, some kind of information about Cernunnos’s sullen son. I clicked through to a new site, slumped in my chair and wondered how many shoes had already dropped.
“Shoes,” I said out loud, and looked at my feet. My luggage. I hadn’t actually promised Morrison I’d stay home, and I was out of underwear. I glanced at the computer screen, where the page loaded with excruciating slowness. Stifling a yawn, I went into the bedroom and kicked over my carry-on, digging through it until I found my baggage ticket. The page still hadn’t loaded when I came back out, so I switched the screen off and left it to load, grabbing my keys on my way out the door. Airports seemed nice and safe. They had all those metal detectors that would keep people with swords from coming after me, and lots of security with no sense of humor to discourage someone if he evaded the metal detectors.
Not that it seemed even slightly plausible that airport security could handle Cernunnos. Or Herne, for that matter, since he seemed to be the one going around actually killing Seattleites. I switched lanes and listened to the uneven pattern of changing asphalt textures under the wheels of the car. Headlights flashed by, going the other direction, rhythmic whisks of light and sound in the dark. When this was over, I promised myself, I was going to go take a nice long drive to somewhere very quiet and try to get a grip on my shiny, weird new life.
Which task I would obviously accomplish with the copious spare cash hanging around in my savings account, during the long periods of free time I’d have between writing parking tickets.
An old Cadillac, big as a boat, flashed by. I remembered the church and reached across the car to open the glove box, letting the butterfly knife tumble forward with the various papers stuffed into the box. It made a solid thud, cushioned by paper, and I glanced at it while I drove.
Marie swore it hadn’t been Cernunnos waiting for her outside the church. I believed her: Cernunnos was not someone I would ever mistake for somebody else. That suggested it was Herne; certainly he appeared to be the one who’d murdered her. I closed my eyes, trying to remember the shape of the man I’d seen from the air, wondering if he fit Herne’s shape. Then I remembered I was driving. Maybe I should stop thinking until I wasn’t on a freeway.
I left the knife in the car when I got to the airport. Security might not be able to stop Herne, but they could certainly stop me. There was a Back in Fifteen Minutes sign on the baggage claim desk, so I wandered upstairs to one of the cafes to find some food, half-expecting to see someone I knew. I always expected to, at airports.
I got an overpriced but surprisingly good hamburger, and a cup of too-hot coffee. I took my bounty and found a table by a window, where I could watch the midnight international flights take off in the distance while I gnoshed on my burger.
“Waiting for someone?”
I focused on the reflection in the window, a broad-shouldered man in a sweatshirt, wearing his long brown hair tied in a pony-tail. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “My boyfriend.”
He grinned. “Your large, bad-tempered, jealous boyfriend?”
“Yeah,” I repeated. “Big. Bigger than you. Samoan,” I added in a fit of inspiration.
“Mind if I join you?”
I looked over at him. “I’m not a prostitute or out looking for a good time, and I’ve had a bad day,” I warned him. “If you make one pass at me, I’ll kick your ass right back to the Carolinas.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Joanne.”
“What the hell are you doing here, Casey?” I stood up and hugged him, letting out an
