okay! I was worried.” She was strong and warm and smelled like clean kid, the heat-induced clamminess long since banished. “Mommy said you made me better!”
Ms. Hampton chuckled. “I’ve told her how you called the ambulance about fifty times in the last few days. She thinks you’re a superhero.” There was almost an apology in the woman’s wry voice. “She insisted we come visit.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said, muffled against Ashley’s shoulder. “It means a lot.” It was one little reminder of something I hadn’t screwed up, and right now I needed it more than I liked to admit. I set Ashley back a few inches so I could grin at her again, hoping the smile wasn’t too watery. “I feel a lot better now that you’ve come to visit me,” I told her, with complete sincerity. “Thank you.”
She wriggled. “You’re welcome. I’m gonna be a policeman when I grow up, too.”
“Yeah?” I was going to get all sniffly any second here. I grinned wider, trying not to leak tears. “Maybe, if it’s okay with your Mom, I can show you some of the police station sometime. You can be just like a real grown-up officer. How’d that be?”
Ashley’s eyes widened and she spun around on her heel to look up at Allison Hampton. “Please, Mommy?”
Allison laughed. “We’ll talk about it, baby. But now we have to leave Officer Walker alone. Mommy has to get to work.”
“Aww.” The kid said it, but I felt it too. But then Ashley turned around and hugged me again, and said, sternly, “You better take care of yourself, Ossifer—Officer Walker.”
I grinned as brightly as I could. “I will, Ashley. Thanks.”
Going to see Gary was a little easier after Ashley’s visit. I climbed the stairs so it’d take longer, stopping to look out windows at the damage done to Seattle’s streets by rampaging mythical wildlife over the last twenty-four hours. Everything was in soft focus because my contacts had washed out. It wasn’t enough to hide the mess, but it took some of the edge off.
Gary was charming a nurse half his age into letting him walk out the hospital doors under his own power when I showed up in his room. The woman look flustered and blushed when I knocked on the door, and made him sit in the wheelchair whether he liked it or not. “Hospital policy,” she said firmly, and I grinned as she beat a hasty retreat.
“You don’t look so good, Jo,” Gary said as soon as the door whispered shut behind her. I let out a half laugh, mostly breath, and came into the room to give him a brief hug.
“You’re the one leaving the hospital a few days after a heart attack and I don’t look so good?”
“I,” Gary proclaimed, “am fit as a fiddle. What in hell happened to you?” He got out of the wheelchair so he could frown down at me in concern.
I put my fingertips on his chest, cautiously calling for the power that lay inside me. It jumped as readily as it had when I’d healed Ashley, silver warmth spilling through my fingers to explore his arteries and heart muscle. There was no blockage anywhere, though I could feel that the muscle itself was wearier than it should have been. I still didn’t know how to fix that, but I was going to learn. I left another little glimmering ball of energy behind and dropped my hand. Gary watched with fascination and I smiled a little. “Is that the doctor’s diagnosis? Fit as a fiddle?”
“Pretty much, yeah. They got no idea why I had a heart attack. You’re avoidin’ the question, Jo.”
“I know.” I sat down on the edge of his bed and Gary leaned next to me, bumping his shoulder against mine. I leaned my head toward his and worked up the courage to say, “You’re here because of me, Gary. You weren’t supposed to have a heart attack. Somebody got to me through you, because I haven’t been taking this seriously enough.”
“You’re nuts,” Gary said. I shook my head.
“I’m not. One of the coven had a knack for messing up people’s hearts. She attacked you with a spell.” Once upon a time I wouldn’t have been able to say that without either snorting derisively or wincing. Right now I was too low to do either. “Right at the same time that the bad guy was lying to me,” I whispered. “You had a heart attack so I’d be distracted and wouldn’t question what I’d been told. And it worked, Gary. I screwed up so bad I almost got you killed.”
“Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, darlin’.” Gary put his arm around my shoulders and tucked me against his side, feeling absurdly strong for a man who was a few days out from death’s door. “You gonna make the same mistake again?”
“No.” I sounded like a little kid, my voice nothing more than a tiny, tearful squeak. Gary put his cheek against the top of my head.
“I know this ain’t easy for you, Jo. You got all this new stuff inside you pushin’ you one way, and all the old stuff pushin’ back. But I told you this before and I’ll tell you again: you got the ability to help people, and you can either keep screwin’ around and pretending it ain’t there, or you can stop bitching and do somethin’ about it. Maybe it just needed to hit real close to home before you started understanding that. In that case, I figure a few days in a hospital flirtin’ with pretty nurses is getting off cheap. You gotta remember I’m an old man, Jo. My kind don’t last forever. I kinda like the idea of having some purpose to my death, if I gotta go.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said in a tight voice. “Except into that wheelchair and then home. I can’t afford to lose you.”
“Yeah?” He sounded pleased. “Why’s that?”
I managed a smile up at him. “Because I’ve still got way too much to learn from you.”
Gary flashed me a grin full of bright white teeth. “What, now you think I’m a teacher or somethin’?”
My smile got more solid. “I think I don’t believe much in coincidence anymore. I think I got into your cab that morning for a reason. Maybe it was just that you drive like a bat out of hell and I needed to be somewhere fast, but I think there’s more to it than that.”
“Pshaw,” Gary said cheerfully. He actually said “pshaw.” I didn’t think people said words like that. “Now you’re just buttering me up.”
“Yeah.” I grinned and patted the handle of the wheelchair. “C’mon, let’s go home. I’ll make you some nice tofu and wheat toast for breakfast.”
Gary clutched his chest, sheer horror descending on his face as he sat. “What are you, crazy, lady? You tryin’ to kill me or something? Tofu? You just did somethin’,” he accused. “Put some kinda tingle on my heart. If that don’t earn me bacon and eggs, then life ain’t worth livin’.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bacon and eggs. But only if I get to ride the wheelchair like it’s a shopping cart.”
“You got yourself a deal, lady.”
We charged out of the room, me balanced precariously on the chair’s frame, and broke for the hospital doors with the horrified staff chasing after us.
