The worst news was I could only think of one way to find out. The rich colors of Billy’s power hadn’t faded at all, memories coalescing around me: moments of love, laughing until the tears came; moments of holding sick children, afraid of what the night might bring. The bright spark of his wife’s smile; the open acknowledgment that his girls had him wrapped around their little fingers, that his boys made him puff up with a fatherly pride he felt a little silly about, in this enlightened day and age.
What he was giving me was the part of him that would never, could never, give up. It was his center, his family, the core of all his strength, and just as surely, the center of all his weaknesses. He embraced every bit of it, flinging it toward me with everything he had, giving me the power to reach all the way to the stars. He knew what he was doing: he could protect himself from the lethal drain but chose not to. Instead he offered up power far beyond the limits of safety. I could take it and follow the Blade’s black thread into the heart of its darkness, and learn what lay behind him.
This morning and almost thirty years ago, my mother had had the same choice.
I fell back into my body with a jolt so hard it made my teeth ache, refusing the maelstrom of power offered to me by my friend. Refusing to take what he would give until the moment his system went into critical failure. I wouldn’t take it, not even to fight the thing that wielded the murderous Blade.
Weak with exhaustion, I was still able to turn in time to catch Billy as he fell, the very life of him drained almost to the sticking point.
The earth itself had power to spare, a thin green-and-blue flow far beneath its frozen surface. I reached for it with a worn-out plea, dragging the offered trickles of energy up through the snow and into myself. I couldn’t reach even as far as the scattered trees, much less beyond the park’s boundaries to beg for some of Seattle’s teeming life energy. I had to wait, bent over Billy’s chilled form, drawing in tiny spurts of strength until the swirling core of silver-blue inside me gave a little groan, and let power flow into my hands.
I fell back on the analogies I knew best. Billy’s battery was drained and needed a jump. The thought of jumping Billy made me burble a snicker. His wife would beat me up.
The logical side of my mind said that if part of a person was the battery, it would probably be his mind. My hands drifted over Billy’s heart without paying any attention to the logical part of my mind. I actually made little pinchers of my fingers, like jumper-cable heads, and clumsily stabbed one hand against my own heart, the other staying over Billy’s.
It was a long and slow transfer of strength, my eyes half-shut and my head bowed over his. I was gaining very little for myself; what I could draw from the frozen ground beneath the snow I simply siphoned into Billy. His color improved gradually and he finally chuckled, more shaking his body than sounding in my ears. “Think we can walk out of here if we lean on each other?”
“Mngrnf.” I thought that was supposed to be “maybe.” Billy seemed to understand, and we took a couple of long minutes to climb to our feet, giggling with exhausted clumsiness.
“You find anything out?” he asked once we were both on our feet.
“Yeah.” I tried out this whole walking thing, one shaky step. I could feel weary relief spill through him and into me.
“What?” His first step wasn’t any steadier than mine. I smiled wearily and pulled myself up a little straighter, letting him lean on me.
“I found out I’ve got the best friends in the world. C’mon. Let’s go, Holliday. Your wife’s expecting us for dinner.”
CHAPTER 9
“I swear on my wife’s grave.” Gary herded me up the stairs to Billy’s front door, maneuvering Billy into line behind me. Mel stood in the open doorway, looking bemused. Gary spoke to her, not to me or Billy, which was just as well, because we’d gone well past punch-drunk sometime in the past hour of work and were howling with laughter every time anybody moved. “I swear on Annie’s grave,” Gary repeated to Mel, “this ain’t my fault. They were like this when I picked ’em up at the station.”
“I’d ask why Billy wasn’t driving,” Melinda said, getting out of her husband’s way as he snickered and staggered through the door, “but I think I see why. I’m Melinda Holliday.” She threaded a hand between me and Billy to shake Gary’s, then fixed me with a gimlet eye. “Have you two been out drinking, Joanie?”
An eruption of giggles escaped through my nose and squirted tears from my eyes. I clapped both hands over my mouth and tried to wiggle a finger up to clear my eyes. “No. Swear to God. Hi, Mel.” I bent to give her a hug, hoping I wouldn’t lose my balance in doing so. She was nearly an entire foot shorter than I was and better dressed than anybody I’d ever met, including Billy. “This’s my friend Gary. Gary Muldoon. He,” I said extravagantly, “is a hero.”
“Where ‘hero’ equates to ‘designated driver’?” Melinda asked archly. “Get in here, all of you.” She sounded like she was herding cats, or her four children. We all straightened up and scurried inside to the best of our ability, more obediently than either cats or her kids would have done.
“Jooooooaaaaanne!”
That was the last thing I heard before I went down in a pile of elbows and knees and squirming bodies. “Oh, sure,” I heard Billy say, somewhere above my head. “Joanie gets all the hugs, but your old man gets nothing?”
“We see you all the time, Dad,” a voice from the pile of squirmy people on top of me pointed out. The oldest kid—Robert-who-didn’t-like-to-be-called-Bobby, that-was-a-little-boy’s-name—extracted himself from the pile to give Billy a proper hug. He was eleven, not quite old enough to have too much dignity to show such blatant affection.
That left two kids squishing me, and one toddler slapping his barefoot way down the hall with the clear intention of finishing off the dog pile. Melinda scooped that one up, eliciting a howl of dismay while the girls, Jacquie and Clara, clambered off me, pulled me to my feet, and attached themselves to my sides like leeches. “Joanne, we haven’t seen you since forever…how come you don’t come over more often…did I show you my friendship pins…no I want to show her my Xbox it’s cooler than the dumb pins—”
I didn’t even know which of them wanted to show me what, but I promised, as loudly as I could, that I wanted to see both the pins and the Xbox and anything else they had to show me, which satisfied Clara, who released me and went tearing off down the hall shouting about the computer games. I grinned after her and gave Jacquie an extra hug. She beamed and clung to my side even more enthusiastically. I had no idea why they liked me so much, but I adored them and it made me feel I’d done something right in a prior life.
Except, the annoying little voice in my head said, brightly, you haven’t had any. That’s what Coyote told you, remember?
I told the annoying voice to shut up and tried to get my boots off without letting go of Jacquie. It was partly self-preservation; I still wasn’t doing so well at the whole standing-on-my-own thing, and neither, it seemed, was Billy, who leaned against the now-closed door and smiled wearily. This was what he needed more than any power I could have jumped his battery with: the rambunctious noise and love of his family.
Erik, the toddler, yowled, “Dooowwn!” and then added, in a snuffle, “Pease?” Melinda laughed and put him down. He crawled over to my feet through the snow we’d tracked in and helpfully began yanking on my shoelaces.
I’d been ushered out of the hall and into the kitchen, and had a glass of wine in my hand before I was entirely sure I’d gotten my boots off. Erik came trundling after us with one of the boots wrapped in his arms, which I took as more or less a good sign. Mel was exchanging pleasantries about it being nice to meet you with Gary, who scooped Jacquie—she was only five—off the floor and turned her upside down. Jacquie shrieked with unholy glee, narrowly missing kicking Gary in the nose. For an old guy with no kids of his own, he ducked well.
The first sip of wine hit me behind the eyes like a bowling ball. I let slip a startled giggle and lifted the glass to peer at it, as if I might see a miniature bottle of whiskey hidden in the rich dark liquid.
“Are you all right, Joanne?” Mel somehow heard my giggle through the general noise and turned to look at me, her eyebrows lifted and a teasing smile in place. “What have you and Bill been up to?”
“All kinds of weird sh—tuff.” I caught myself just in time, but Robert, sitting on the counter where he wasn’t
