between them. They looked like they probably reduced the noise off the street, which might help a cop sleep better at night.
Unless, of course, he had employees calling him up in the middle of the night to rant and rave and profess jealousy to him. This minute examination of his front lawn was not getting me any closer to dealing with my embarrassing behavior or the woman in Morrison’s bed. The Ram had to be hers. I couldn’t imagine Morrison owning a recreational vehicle.
I gritted my teeth and left Petite, following a stone footpath up to Morrison’s front door. Yellow rosebushes lined the front of the house, and a wheelbarrow sat up against the bushes on the porch’s far side. A blue tarp was tucked neatly around the barrow’s burden, a plastic-wrapped set of shears weighing it down for good measure.
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
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.
