wasn’t much shorter than him. She was five feet, five inches tall now. Mama sometimes shook her head and said if she didn’t stop growing she’d have trouble finding a man who was tall enough for her. Mama . . .
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” the FBI man said. She nodded, not able to talk because she was too close to crying. “We’ve got someone who can make this place better. He can’t fix everything, but he can make it so you won’t be too uncomfortable staying here awhile. But you have to give permission. He can’t help if you don’t. Will you let him help?”
“Yes! Yes, where is he?” She looked around. “Can he make it not so dark and dirty and scary? Where is he?”
“His name is Sam. Remember that.” He straightened. “He’s not here right now. You won’t meet him until you wake up.”
“Wake up? You mean—you mean I’m dreaming? You’re not real?” That was awful, because this place was real. She knew it was. Even if she was dreaming, this house was horribly real.
“I’m real, but yeah, you’re dreaming. You need to remember . . .” He stopped and looked over his shoulder as if someone was behind him, talking to him. But no one was there. “I’ve got to go. Remember the name. Sam. You need to let Sam help you, okay?”
“Okay, but—wait!”
He was fading. She forgot what he’d said about touching and reached for him, but it didn’t do any good. He faded out like he’d been nothing but smoke and a breeze had blown him away.
“Wait,” she whispered. But it was too late. She was alone.
That was a man’s voice, too, but not the same man. She knew this voice. He was really nice and . . .
“Julia, I need you to wake up now.”
She blinked her eyes and everything was bright again. Too bright for eyes barely awake, and she was staring up at a white, white ceiling and someone was holding her hand, so she wasn’t alone, and that felt good, but . . .
“Back with me now?”
She could hear the smile in his voice so she turned her head on the pillow and there he was—the gorgeous man she’d first seen in the hall in the restaurant. The man who was the one good thing in her crumbling life. Mr. Turner. She managed to smile at him, but it felt wobbly.
She remembered some things now, and she didn’t want to.
“You seemed to be having trouble waking up,” he said, and he smoothed her hair back from her face in the way her mother sometimes did. Not her father. Father was as hard to reach as the FBI agent in her dream. Harder, because he never tried to reach back. “Maybe you didn’t want to.”
“No,” she whispered. “It’s okay you woke me up. I had . . . bad dreams.”
He nodded as if he understood, and even though she knew he didn’t, not really, it helped that he wanted to. “That’s not surprising. Julia, we’ve found someone who can help. He can’t make things right, but he can help, if you want him to.”
“What—what’s his name?”
“Sam.”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “Yes, please.”
IT was after midnight when Lily stepped out of the bright-ly lit emergency room at Scripps Mercy to go to UCSD Medical Center, where Barbara Lennox lay in a coma. Surprise stopped her steps. It had rained while she was inside—not a lot, judging by the dearth of puddles, but enough that the pavement was wet and the world smelled wonderful.
She drew in a lungful of air scrubbed clean, perfumed with ozone and humus. Night air slid like cool silk over the skin on her face. Earlier she’d gotten her shoulder harness and a slightly wrinkled jacket from the trunk of Rule’s car because she was damned if she’d work a case without having her weapon at hand. Now she wanted to take that jacket off and let the clean air wash over more of her. She didn’t; people got jittery if they saw her weapon. But she did suck in more of that crisp air.
Scott made a motion and Mark loped around her. Mark would use his nose to make sure no one had messed with the car while they were inside. “You drive,” she told Scott.
He nodded. “Where are we going?”
“UCSD Medical Center.” Her feet didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to see the woman in a coma. Was that what awaited Lily’s mother if she didn’t allow Sam to help? Why was one victim comatose, another shaken but functional, and a third somewhere in between?
Stupid feet. Those questions wouldn’t get answered by standing here in the parking lot. Lily made herself start for the car.
A wisp of fog drifted in front of her and quickly shaped itself into a man—a hard-faced man with dark hair wearing a dull gray suit with a wrinkled shirt. “It’s Drummond,” she said quickly to Scott, then: “You’d better not wink out right away. I didn’t get to ask you anything, and—”
“Things are different this time.”
“Different how?” She cocked her head. “You look younger.”
“Never mind that shit,” he said, but he ran a hand over his hair—which he had more of than he used to. He looked maybe forty, she thought. Not a lot younger than when he died, but some. The age he’d been before his wife died? “I’ll mostly be working things on my side. I may not even hear you call me like I used to. I’m not tied to you the same way. Because we used to be tied I can find you, but I couldn’t talk to you if not for the way you died once. You didn’t tell me about that.” He scowled as if she’d withheld facts pertinent to a case.
“So who did?”
He waved that away as unimportant. “Someone on this side. The thing is, having died once, you’ve got this little open place in you. It lets me get close enough for you to hear me.”
She scowled. “I am not turning into a medium.”
“Okay, fine. I doubt any ghosts are going to find that spot, anyway. Only reason I can is because of that tie we used to have.”
“But if the tie is gone—”
“It left . . . call it a path. Or a habit. Same difference. Would you quit worrying about the shit I can’t explain and pay attention? It’s a lot harder for me to manifest this time and I can’t do it for long, and there’s stuff you need to know. First, you’re dealing with something Friar got from that elf before he escaped from the warehouse. An artifact.”
“Did you see it? What does it do?”
“I didn’t see it. I felt it. It feels, uh . . . evil, I guess you’d say.”
Lily turned that word over in her mind. “Evil is a pretty broad category.”
“On this side, evil means something specific. Evil affects . . .” His mouth kept moving, but she didn’t hear anything.
“Back up. I lost some of that.”
He scowled. “There’s stuff I can’t say. Not won’t. Can’t. Just take my word for it—what Friar got hold of is evil in a way that upsets the heavy hitters on my side of things.”
“Heavy hitters?”
He looked down and muttered. “Angels. Sort of. Not really, because they aren’t . . . oh, hell, call them whatever you want, or don’t call them anything at all. That might be best. The thing is, everyone on this side is real restricted in what we can do on your side. Even the heavy hitters. It’s all about choice. Choice and time. On your side, time’s like a funnel that lets only one drop of now through at a time, and choice is what you do with that drop. No one gets to take away the choices other people make—only, that object Friar got hold of does just that. I don’t know how it works, so don’t ask, but by wiping out memories, it robs people of all the choices they made.”
Lily thought about her mother. All the choices Julia Yu had made over a lifetime, wiped out. Disintegrated. Her throat tightened. She managed to push a couple of words out through her tight throat. “Yeah. That’s evil.”
He nodded. “It affects this side of things, too. That’s why I can be here. There’s a . . . it’s like a fissure or a
