Speaking of which. “How, um. I mean, who, um. I mean, um.” Okay, only one of us got the Mildly Clever Badge for the morning, and it sure wasn’t me.
“Barb Bragg is my sister,” he volunteered, somehow managing to translate my garbled question into something coherent. “Redhead? Yea tall?” He made a gesture around five and a half feet from the floor, and took a frying pan out of my cupboard. “She’s got some buddies in the North Precinct and got invited along to the barbeque. I tagged along. Never could resist a woman in uniform.”
I stared at his shoulders. Nice wide world-supporting shoulders that tapered into a narrow waist and hips that— “I wasn’t in uniform,” I muttered. He flashed a grin over his shoulder at me. His teeth were very slightly crooked. It was the only thing that saved him from sheer perfection. He couldn’t possibly be real, although my dreams weren’t usually this good. “Are you actually real?”
“Guess I can’t resist a woman out of uniform, either. Least-ways not when she can out-arm-wrestle me.” He did a double take at me. “Am I real? I dunno. Did you want an after-party drunken philosophy answer, or just my driver’s license?”
“The license would be great.” I was pretty sure the average godling or demon or monster under the bed didn’t carry one, although I hadn’t thought to ask any of the ones I’d met. I’d try to remember, next time. Mark arched an eyebrow, then took his wallet out of his back pocket and tossed it to me.
I opened it and pulled out an Arizona state driver’s license that had a relievingly bad picture of Mark, along with his birth date—he was two years younger than me—and an organ donor’s stamp. A knot I didn’t know was there untied beneath my heart. I could look up his license number at the precinct, but the fact that he even had ID was an awfully good start. I put it away and let out a fwoosh of air. “Did I really beat you arm wrestling? You must’ve been really shitfaced.” My biceps weren’t sore and I was sure I didn’t have the upper-body strength to match his smooth muscles in a fair fight.
“Either that or I know what hill to die on.” In the time it’d taken me to peruse his ID, he’d taken over my kitchen, and now appeared to be making omelets. I hadn’t known I had omelet fixings, but he was managing. Omelets with chili and cheese, no less. And toast. He’d even taken a can of orange juice out of the freezer. Maybe I needed to get drunk and pick guys up more often. I’d never managed to get such a babe to sluff around my kitchen half naked when I’d tried sober dating. Not that I’d done that for a while, either.
“Your sister,” I said. “She wouldn’t be the one in the Daisy Mae shorts, would she?”
“That’s her, yep. A million pounds of punch packed into a teeny-weeny body. Cute, isn’t she?”
I knew there was some kind of enormous cosmic irony going on here, but I put my head down on the table, held my breath and hoped, just for a moment, that it would all go away.
Instead, the doorbell rang.
CHAPTER 2
“Want me to get that?” Mark asked easily. Maybe he was accustomed to waking up in strange women’s beds as a matter of course and had a certain protocol about it all. Me, I wasn’t accustomed to that sort of thing at all, and leaped out of my chair with a yelped “No!” The chair banged into the wall and I ran for the door as if Mark might disregard my reply and whisk himself off to open it. The smell of omelets cooking made my stomach rumble impatiently as I unlocked the door and pulled it open to find a big old man with bushy eyebrows looking at me quizzically.
“Nice robe. You ain’t cookin’ an old man breakfast, are you? ’Cause I brought doughnuts. Besides, I know how you cook.”
I clutched the collar of my robe closed, feeling like a fifties housewife. “Uh. Gary. Uh. Hi. What’re you—ah, shit!” God, my prowess with the language was stunning today. I was an embarrassment to the diploma laying claim to a B.A. in English lying somewhere in my apartment. “Gary, I, uh, forgot.”
He squinted down at me, gray eyes curious. Gary Muldoon was the most solid, real-looking person I’d ever met in my life, and at seventy-three he still had the build of the linebacker he’d been in college. But there was a bit of tiredness in the Hemingway wrinkles, and he was moving slower than he had when I met him, thanks to a heart attack a few weeks earlier.
A heart attack that was my fault, something I couldn’t forget. Even the memory made a nervous flutter in my stomach.
It wasn’t your usual butterflies. It was the way I perceived the power that had awoken in me seven months earlier, when catching sight of a fleeing woman through an airplane window had triggered a series of what I considered to be remarkably unfortunate events. Finding the woman had resulted, more or less directly, in getting a sword stuffed through my lungs. While I was busy dying, a snide coyote dropped by my psyche and gave me the option to survive the skewering—as a shaman. A healer, one with Great Things in store for me.
If I’d known then what I know now…
All right, I’d have made the same decision, because nobody wants to die at twenty-six if there’s a choice in the matter. But I didn’t want to be a shaman. The whole idea that there was a magic-filled alternative to our world made my skin itch. I like rational, sensible explanations for things: that was part of why I was a mechanic by trade. Or had been, anyway. Vehicle diagnostics were simple and straightforward. Follow a certain set of steps and the vehicle runs better.
Having an insistent, fluttery coil of power centered right below my sternum, impatient to be used to right the world, is not normal. And that bubble was what shivered in me every time I saw Gary, partly because he was still healing, and partly because his illness really had been my fault.
I’d spent most of the past six months ignoring my power as best I could. It turned out that had been a massive error in judgment. Among other things, it let a very nasty person induce a heart attack in my closest friend so I’d be distracted while the world went to hell in a handbasket. It had worked extremely well.
I was capable of learning from my mistakes. After six months of strenuous denial, I finally realized I was going to have to suck it up and learn to use this power, because otherwise I was going to be used and taken advantage of. Worse, my friends were in danger, and that, if nothing else, was enough to convince me to pull my head out of my ass.
I put my hand over Gary’s heart. A little thread of glee burst free from that coil of power inside me, silver- blue light splashing up my arm, under the skin, as if it followed the blood vessels. It probably did. Through that spatter of power I could feel the steady, comforting strength of an ancient tortoise, sharing its spirit—and, I hoped, its longevity—with Gary. It was the one thing I’d done right recently, bringing a totem animal back to help heal my friend.
The tortoise accepted my offering of vitality, though I got a sense of amusement from it as I worked through my favorite analogy: cars. To me, patching up a heart that’d had an attack was like changing out bald tires. They were worn and tired, just like an attack made the heart, but you couldn’t just switch out one heart for another. I liked the idea of working from the inside, like I could slip a new tire around the hub and slowly inflate it, strengthening the old muscle with newer healthy cells. Every time I saw Gary I threw a little of that idea into him, trying to help fix the damage I’d allowed to be done. I expected his next annual checkup to determine he had the heart of a twenty-five-year-old.
“How could you forget?” he demanded as I let my hand fall again. “We been doin’ this every day for the past ten days, Jo. And your eggs are gonna burn.”
“What’s ’this’?” Mark came out of the kitchen, all full of tenor good cheer. “Crap, Joanne, are you seeing somebody? I’m sorry if I screwed—oh.” He got a good look at Gary and evidently categorized him as too old. That was new. Half the people I knew were convinced I was involved in a lusty May-December romance.
“The eggs aren’t going to burn,” Mark added with a broad grin, and offered his hand to Gary. “I’m Mark.”
I wrinkled up my face, afraid to look at Gary, but one eye peeped open, unable to look away, either.
He’d all but dropped his teeth, jaw long and eyes googly. He was staring at Mark, but somehow managed to
